The long-simmering controversy over whether or not Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie actually had sex on camera during a graphic love scene in the 1973 film Don’t Look Now has surfaced again.
Yes, they did, says former Paramount executive Peter Bart, who claims in his new book that he was on the set watching as it happened.
No we didn’t, says Sutherland in an email to the New York Daily News, adding: “Not true. None of it. Not the sex. Not him witnessing it.”
The scene is one of the most notorious “did they or didn’t they?” moments in movie history. It has long been rumoured in Hollywood that the sex was real and that outtakes from the scene have been viewed in private Beverly Hills screening rooms. 
Bart claims in his book Famous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob (And Sex) that he had visited the set as a young studio executive as the scene was being filmed and he had no doubt that the sex was real.
The stars have always maintained that the apparent explicitness was due to good acting and directing in what was an unscripted improvisation.
Both Christie, now 69, and Sutherland, 75, were in their 30s and at the height of their careers when the movie, a psychological thriller adapted from a short story by Daphne du Maurier, was released.