It all comes down to a nun and a nurse, says Julie Walters. There was Sister
Patrick, a tyrant giantess at St Paul's preparatory school in Birmingham,
and Sister Island at the Queen Elizabeth nursing home, also in Birmingham.
The young Walters wanted to act, and didn't want to be a nurse, and these
two were the reason. “Sister Patrick was very, very frightening,” trills
Walters. “She was 6ft and obviously menopausal and Irish. We had miming
class on a Friday afternoon. One week I mimed this gossiping housewife-type
thing. And she hooted with laughter and I will never forget the power. We
were all terrified of her, and she said, 'You should go on the stage'. And
every week she would say, 'Julie, come on' and I'd do some other thing, and
that was it.”
The words of this nun are declaimed, obviously, in a strident Irish accent.
Think Charlton Heston playing Moses as a menopausal Irish nun. Walters has
many accents. In our hour in this room in the Soho Hotel, she does Irish
nuns, her Irish mother, American talk-show hosts and Michael Caine. She also
has an accent that she uses only to do impressions of herself. The usual
Walters is comedy Birmingham. Walters on Walters is more nasal, stretched
out and parodical. Julie plays Julie as a clown.
“I was the little, funny one,” she says of her schooldays. “I felt I was the
child among grown women.” She says something similar about being on the set
of Mamma Mia!, playing the quirky friend of Meryl Streep and Christine
Baranski. “I was very aware of their cool American accents,” she says. “And
I'd hear mine, a bit sort of Midlands. And I'd think, oh no. Should I be
American as well?”
Actually, in Mamma Mia!, Julie plays Julie. It is the publicity drive for the
film that brings us together. Julie dressed down is Julie dressed up;
stylish clobber and funky, highlighted hair. Mamma Mia! is a glorious riot
of colour and song and, in my view, is going to be a hit.
Walters hasn't seen it yet but says it was a lot of fun to make. “At first I
was intimidated meeting Meryl,” she says. “I was sort of scared. I can't
think of many others I'd be like that with. I certainly wasn't with Pierce
Brosnan. I was all, ‘Cooo-eee! Pierce!'. But it passed. We shot loads of
early scenes in Greece and by then we'd all been out and got drunk and had
meals and been wild together. She's very unstarry, Meryl, once you know her.”
Streep, Baranksi and Walters are a triumph, downing ouzo, leering at men and
attempting to relive their supposed past (as a girl band called Donna and
the Dynamos) in a manner that stays just the right side of grotesque.
Walters cackles at the memory. “We said this is probably the last time we'll
ever get parts like this, where you can be a bit pretty and can actually
pull a bloke. We're all knocking 60. It gets a bit ooon-seeem-illy.”
How is it that Walters has managed to remain one of us as opposed to one of
them? From Educating Rita (1983), through Buster (1988) and up to Billy
Elliot (2000), Calendar Girls (2003) and Harry Potter (ongoing) she has
always been the human touch. She's British to the core, but in a different
way from Judi Dench or Helena Bonham Carter. Is it just a class thing? Why
is she so adored?
“Oooh,” she says. “You're embarrassing me. I'm getting a hot flush. I dunno.
People do feel they know me. They come up to me and talk to me in the street
in a manner they wouldn't do with other actors. It's the parts that I play,
partly. And maybe there is something in me that wants that. I don't like to
feel remote from people. I like people.”
Walters is 58 now and she has been acting, more or less continuously, since
the age of 19. Expelled from school at the end of her second-last year,
apparently for being generally indolent, she told her mother that she had
left voluntarily because she wanted to be a nurse. So, she ended up training
at the Queen Elizabeth nursing home. That was where she met Sister Island.
The nurse. “She was on my ward,” says Walters, still with a trace of
pleading in her voice. “She was 67 and she had never moved from the nursing
home. I remember thinking (accent): ‘This is a sign. I'll be here for ever .
..' Seeing your name indelibly printed on your laundry bag, stuff like that.
I was too immature. Too lacking in confidence. So I got out of it after the
intermediary exams.”
Not so easy to do. Walters recalls both of her brothers and her father having
to stand between her and her mother when she broke the news in the family
kitchen. “‘Oh great God, what have I reared?'” she trills, Irishly. “She was
just frightened. It's not like there were actors in the family. She'd come
from Ireland. She had this thing that, ‘You've got to succeed otherwise
we'll starve'. When I had a pension, she came around.”
Theatre came first, and then a spot of television. Then, at what by today's
standards would be the relatively veteran age of 33, she landed her first
film role, in Educating Rita with Michael Caine. She played Rita, the
aspirational housewife who demands an education.
After Educating Rita, in a sense, came Educating Julie. “Michael took me to
loads of places,” she chuckles. “He'd point out famous people. I'll never
forget him taking me to Elaine's, in New York. We'd be sitting in the corner
and he'd nod and say (accent): ‘There's Henry Mancini. Moon River.' I needed
the toilet, and he said, ‘Turn left at Woody Allen'. They have all these
pictures on the wall. I was looking out for one of them, then I fell over
Woody Allen's legs. Actually him! Woody Allen! It was very ... sweet.”
A short stint in Los Angeles followed. She appeared on chat shows, and was
offered a contract with Disney, but opted to return home. “They didn't
really know what to do with me,” she says. “They were all ‘Ooh, luvaduck'
sorts of parts, or romantic comedies with no substance. And the writing back
here was so good. Hollywood is all about escape, whereas Europe is about
let's have a look underneath. Well, except for Mamma Mia!”
Walters met her husband, Grant Roffey, in a bar “full of Hooray Henrys” in the
mid-1980s by asking, in a loud voice, “is anybody here a member of the
Labour Party?” He was with the AA at the time. They now have a 20-year-old
daughter called Maisie, and he runs the couple's organic farm in Sussex. You
can buy Roffey's sausages, often from the man himself, at Twickenham market.
Farming, says Walters, is not an easy life. “Blue f***ing tongue!” she says.
“Soil Association. Fill in this form, that form, there's always something.”
They have cows, sheep and pigs, and their 1,000 chickens, she says, are
properly free range. “People say free range,” she sneers, “and it often
means f*** all.” This is the only time she swears.
The farm also offers privacy, with woods she can walk in, and a two-mile track
to the nearest road. “My husband says to me, your shoulders drop on holiday,
once we get into France,” she says. “I remember Michael saying, ‘Rich and
famous? It's much better to be just rich'.” I didn't quite get it to begin
with. But he's right. You lose anonymity. I say to my family that you've no
idea until you lose it how precious anonymity is.”
Walters sounds anxious when she speaks like this. You sense that she doesn't
like to speak ill of her fans in case they go away. There is an
autobiography coming out at the end of this year. Walters is agonising. She
doesn't want to be nasty, but she doesn't want to be dull. She's going to
mention Sister and Sister, the nun and the nurse.
Post Mamma Mia! we can expect to see Walters in the remaining Harry Potter
films, in which she plays Ron Weasley's mother. She speaks of all the young
Potter stars, especially Rupert Grint, with real fondness. Daniel Radcliffe,
she reckons, will probably end up directing. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince is due out this year, and the next two, both based on the final book,
are yet to be filmed. “I'm in them loads!” says Walters, and her eyes
narrow. Then she does a new accent, which is basically herself, but evil. “I
think I have to kill Helena Bonham Carter,” she says. Then she cackles
again, like your favourite witchy aunt.
Mamma Mia! 387 shows (and a power cut)
by Michael Simkins
My agent had called, back in 2000. “You've got an audition for a new musical,”
he said. “Twenty-five of Abba's greatest hits shoehorned into a new story
about a woman running a bar on a Greek island.” We tittered privately at
such a ludicrous idea.
Boy, were we wrong. There are few sensations in life more wonderful than
striding out on to a stage dressed in gold spandex to a couple of thousand
ecstatic fans. During my stint in the production (as one of the possible
dads) I did 387 performances (it would have been 388 had Westminster Council
not drilled through power cables one evening, thus throwing the stage into
darkness). But even on a Friday matinee in darkest November to auditoriums
full of uncomprehending German businessmen, the show never failed to work
its magic.
The Littlestar management are legendary, in a business not always noted for
its philanthropy, for looking after their actors, a commitment that has been
repaid in that it is known as one of the best gigs in the West End. They
also throw great parties, usually with a free bar, always a useful tool in
keeping the troops happy.
Of the original group, Björn, Benny and Frida all joined us on stage on
various occasions, each time to an ovation that could have been heard back
in Sweden. Heady days.
Watching Pierce Brosnan playing my part in the movie reminded me how different
life could have been if I'd ever got a shot at Remington Steele. As the old
theatrical saying goes, it's not enough that you succeed - your rivals also
have to fail; but Brosnan was having none of it, with a nice understated
quality to his portrayal, and looking a million dollars, damn him.
In fact the film cast are obviously having as much fun as we all did. Or, to
quote a well-known lyric, they're having the time of their lives...
