‘Welcome to my humble abode!” cries Julie Walters, at the door of an
outrageously fancy hotel suite overlooking Regent Street, in central London.
She’s up from her organic farm in Sussex for the night to talk about her new
smash-hit autobiography and has been upgraded to a 2,500 sq ft palace in the
sky. A bit OTT, she tuts, leading me through to the sitting room, pointing
out the marble bathrooms and walk-in wardrobes along the way.
“That’s your loo there,” she adds, faux-grandly. “Of course there’s another
one for my friends, and this is mine – with the bidet.”
Bidets are exactly the sort of aspirational, faintly rude objects Walters
loves to lampoon. Naturally she has an anecdote. “We went on a trip to Paris
when I was 14 with my school,” she says. “We were all staying in this French
school, and when we got up in the morning, Theresa Keogh, I’m sorry to say,
had dumped in the bidet.”
Walters’s tiny black eyes watch me for signs of laughter, and when she’s sure
that I’ve got the joke, she laughs too. A great big series of honks.
Jokes are her life’s motivator, her reason for being. They were the handy
weapon she developed to divert the wrath of the nuns at her convent school
and to keep spirits up on NHS wards when she was a student nurse in the late
1960s.
After stunning her working-class mother by announcing that she wanted to be an
actress, she later made the whole country titter, most memorably in her work
with Victoria Wood. Even when she plays it relatively straight – in
Educating Rita or Billy Elliot (she earned Oscar nominations for both) – the
laughs are never far away.
The youngest of three children, she was raised in a down-at-heel Birmingham
suburb, where her father was a builder and decorator and her Irish mother
worked at the post office. At home there was a grandma with dementia, a
libidinous guinea pig and no running hot water. Nothing in her memoir is
immune to her light touch – whether losing her virginity, plaster-casting
her boyfriend’s penis, experimenting with LSD or falling prey to a child
abuser.
“And now I have to kill myself publicising it,” she winces comically, sinking
between the cushions of a giant sofa. I should bloody well hope so, I say –
you were paid enough to write it. “Ha, well, yes.”
Walters’s publisher handed over £1.6m for her story, at the time a record
advance for a British show-business autobiography (Dawn French has
reportedly since received more). Why so much? There are more celebrated
actresses, and certainly more glamorous ones. I suspect there are few who
are so well liked, though. Walters has somehow kept up an illusion that
she’s more one of us than one of them.
Don’t be fooled. Behind her ’ickle-old-me-at-the-Oscars act, Walters is
punishingly successful. A quick look at the UK’s 20 biggest-grossing films
of all time reveals that she was in five of them – more than any other
actor, living or dead. Her latest, Mamma Mia!, is close to knocking Titanic
off the top spot. Did she have any clue it would be such a hit?
“Not at all. I’ll tell you how it happened. The phone rang. Paul, my agent,
goes, ‘Would you like to play Meryl Streep’s . . . ’ I said, ‘Yeeees! I’ll
do it, whatever it is.’ He said, ‘It’s Mamma Mia!.’ I said, ‘Oh no, which
character? The fat friend?’ ” Actually she’s surprisingly trim in person,
though she’s made her name playing little old ladies (Mrs Overall in Acorn
Antiques) and tubbers (Mrs Weasley in Harry Potter) – parts that have
required wigs and fat suits. “Even in Mamma Mia! I had a false bottom
because they wanted me to look rounded,” she complains.
“But it’s unbelievable,” she continues. “I’d never been in anything –
including Harry Potter – where people have come up to me and said, ‘I saw
it. I saw it twice! I’m going again!’ It happens everywhere I go.” But it’s
. . .Abba, I stutter. “I know,” she says, equally incredulous, “but they
love it because it’s good fun, and that’s what people want at the moment.”
By this measure, her new book – already striding up the bestseller lists –
should do big numbers. It romps along until the birth of her daughter
Maisie, in 1988, but goes no further. When Maisie was two she fell ill with
leukaemia and spent two years on the brink. So why hasn’t Walters written
about this period in her life? “Because [Maisie’s] a private person – it’s
not her fault I’m her mum. It’s hard enough for people in life coping with
their identity without me.”
Maisie aside, the rest of her life seems up for grabs. I spat my tea out when
I came to the passage devoted to the evening she insisted on making a
plaster cast of her former boyfriend’s manhood. Let’s just say she was a bit
stingy with the Vaseline and had to undo the damage timorously with a large
pair of kitchen scissors. The boyfriend – whom she calls DT – was recently
outed in the papers.
“I called him up to apologise and he said, ‘Well, I did choke on my Coco Pops
when I saw that, but I think I might still have the cast somewhere.’ I
called my editor and said, ‘Forget my face; let’s have DT’s cast on the
cover.’ They didn’t go for it,” she sniffs.
It has not always been high jinks, though. As a child Walters was a chronic
bed-wetter who suffered from night terrors. In fact by her mid-forties she
could count on one hand the number of times she had achieved eight hours of
straight sleep. Her father doted on her, but her mother – who died in the
late 1980s – was a difficult character whom Walters spent her entire
childhood trying, and mostly failing, to please.
At the age of 10 Walters and three friends were playing in the garden of a
derelict house when a man rounded them up, ostensibly to give them a
telling-off for being there. Terrified he’d tell the nuns, they followed him
to a back alley, where he made them lift their skirts and touched them up.
Later he panicked and fled.
“I just talked to one of the girls who was there and we both remember to this
day exactly what he looked like. He’s been in my dreams.” She gives a
shiver, then shakes it off. Not a fan of a downer, our Julie.
After fluffing her exams, Walters tried her hand at nursing, but it wasn’t a
good fit. She knew in her heart she wanted to act and got a place on
Manchester Polytechnic’s acting course. Her mother did not take it well.
“It’s not like we came from a middle-class family where people did amateur
dramatics.”
Her career ignited almost the instant she joined the Every-man Theatre in
Liverpool – the grooviest rep of the day – and the film Educating Rita later
opened the doors of Hollywood. Then came the first of five Baftas – four of
them on the trot – before what she calls her pisshead phase. “It wasn’t
being an alcoholic – it was going wild. It happened when I got famous. It
was like having my teens in my early thirties: blotting out your life, not
having to think about anything.”
Walters settled down only after she picked up Grant Roffey, an AA man and her
future husband, in a Fulham pub. They now own a 200-acre sprawling organic
farm in Sussex. “Cattle, sheep and chickens,” she says. “Grant gets up at
4am to do his own butchering.” She’s obviously pulling in serious money –
why bother? “Well, it makes a profit and we believe in it. Talk about fan
mail – his is better than mine. He gets letters saying, ‘These are the best
sausages I’ve ever eaten’.”
Her fan mail can’t be bad, though. Especially since she earned that most
ghastly of monikers – national treasure. “Oh, I know,” she says, heaving a
sigh. She wonders if they might soon start sending round coach parties of
middle Englan-ders to eat scones and gawp at her. “Everyone comes up to me
saying, ‘Cooee, Julie! Hello!’ as if I know them. Of course I don’t bloody
know them. Am I flummoxed by it? Sometimes. I think, ‘Ooh, love, go easy.’
For a time, I did feel this pressure that I had to be funny, but it passes.”
Does it ever get too much? “Only when you’re having a Dutch cap fitted,” she
snorts. “The nurse said, ‘Do I know you?’ I thought, ‘Here we go . . .’ ”
That’s Another Story: the Autobiography, by Julie Walters, is
published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £18.99
