JULIE WALTERS The great dame
Dame Julie Walters kept her cancer diagnosis quiet, because she didn’t want to make a fuss. Now, Emma Clifton finds the famously mischievous 70-year-old is wondering if this latest movie will be her last, as she looks back on her most memorable roles and talks about loving the anonymity of life on her organic sheep farm.
To be a member of the audience of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre Company, in the mid1970s, would be to have had a sneak peek at some of acting’s greats as they cut their dramatic teeth. Bill Nighy, the charming star of films like Love Actually and About Time, starred alongside Pete Postlethwaite, the high-cheekboned star of In The Name of the Father. And then there was Julie Walters, in her early 20s, who had left a career as a nurse to study drama and English at university, after an old boyfriend told her she had some acting potential. She has gone on to become one of England’s most beloved actors, and her career is in its fifth decade, which is impressive when you consider she started it on a whim.
In the past two years, Julie has beaten stage three bowel cancer, become a Dame and turned 70, and she has approached all three of these life milestones with the same trademark resolute spirit.
It was only once she completed all her treatment for cancer that she publicly revealed what she had been going through, not wanting to cause any fuss at the time. When she missed the premiere for Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again in 2018, her agent told people it was because she slipped and ruptured a hernia – an excuse that was so very unglamorous, there was never any reason to think it might not be true. But in reality, she was staring down one of her biggest battles yet.
It was during the filming of her latest movie The Secret Garden (due for release here this year), that she got the diagnosis. In 2018, she had been suffering some “slight discomfort” and indigestion and had seen her doctor, before returning months later with stomach pain, heartburn and vomiting. After being referred to a gastric surgeon, she was told they had found an abnormality in her intestine.
“I was still thinking, ‘That’s ridiculous, he must have made a mistake,’ I couldn’t believe it,” Julie says. She can still vividly remember having to tell Grant Roffey, her husband of over 20 years. “I’ll never forget his face. Tears came into his eyes.”
While she was told she had a good prognosis, Julie admits there were darker times when she feared she might not make it through. While waiting for her surgery, she recalls thinking, “Well, I may not come round from the anaesthetic.” But she did – with 30cm of her colon removed – and after a round of chemotherapy, as the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, she is now doing very well.
However, like so many people who have gone through the same process, Julie says it has given her pause for thought as she readjusts her priorities, particularly when it comes to work.
“The person before the operation is different to this person,” she says candidly. Having to say no to work meant a relief from the prospect of a gruelling filming schedule – 12 to 16 hour days are no joke at any age, let alone 70. “I was due to do two big series, and there were two films, and I just didn’t have to do any of it,” Julie says. “And that was wonderful.”
Her last film?
In the film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden, she plays the intimidating Mrs Medlock, a role once made famous by fellow British acting great Maggie Smith.
There’s a chance it may be her last film, Julie has hinted. “I’m not saying I’ll never act again, but I certainly don’t think I can go back to [working] six days a week, five in the morning till seven o’clock at night.”
It was estimated that Julie had been living with cancer for a couple of years without realising it, which added some poignancy to her final months with her best friend, comedian and singer Victoria Wood, who died in 2016 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. “[It made me realise] how frightened she must have been… because at least I could have an operation. She couldn’t,” Julie says. “But the other thing I thought was ‘God, the last time I saw her was in the hospital, sitting by the bed… and I had cancer at the same time.’”
Julie and Victoria were professional partners in comedy crime for many decades, as well as being best friends, and they both shared the same deep streak of pure naughtiness. Right from when she was asked to leave convent school, aged 15, Julie was well-known for her mischief. It’s a trait that has
“The person before the operation is different to this person.”
served her well throughout her career, and is the reason so many of her characters remain icons of British cinema history – characters who were, on paper, ordinary mums and wives and housekeepers until they ended up in her capable hands.
Her appearances on The Graham Norton Show are considered some of the most bonkers in the show’s history – which is saying something. She once out-kinked 50 Shades of Grey star Jamie Dornan with a story about a sexual fetish she had learned about while filming the escort film Personal Services (involving a vacuum cleaner). Then there was the time on Norton’s famous red couch that she encountered the US rapper 50 Cent. After revealing he still had a bullet fragment stuck in his tongue after being shot in 2000, he suddenly found himself on the receiving end of a lot of attention from Julie. “Let’s have a feel, 50,” she said, sharing an exuberant hug with the rapper, before sticking her fingers into his mouth. The stars on the couch next to her, including Kate Winslet, looked on open-mouthed.
It’s her down-to-earth “just had a couple of wines round the dinner table” energy that makes her so unique in a business that can be anything but relaxed. Julie never sought fame in the US, preferring to stick to telling uniquely British stories. It was something of a point of pride for her, and Britain responded gamely. In 2017, she was named Dame Commander of the British Empire by the Queen, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. “The most exciting time was when the letter came. I looked at it and thought, ‘What?’ Because it’s that sort of very formal speak,” she laughs. “‘What does this say?’ then I saw ‘Dame’ and I thought, ‘Bloody hell’. That was the most exciting bit. Somebody emailed me to say, ‘How did you celebrate?’ I weeded the garden.”
Her personal life is the quiet anchor to her pressured professional life; she lives on an organic Sussex farm, complete with 300 sheep, with her husband Grant Roffey. Julie has deliberately picked lighter, more humorous roles in the last few years; starring in family films like Paddington 1 and 2, the Mamma Mia sequel and Mary Poppins Returns.
The intense film roles of her 30s, 40s and 50s left her exhausted, she says. “Roles that require me to be blubbing all the time or mourning somebody take a lot out of you… I don’t want to have to break my heart on stage every night, I just think that’s not good for you. And I don’t really want to do it in films and television any more either.”
Nothing to prove
The combination of the damehood and the knowledge that her work would never dry up, made Julie realise she didn’t have anything left to prove. She had commercial and critical success, award nominations and wins including Academy Award nominations for her star-making performance in Educating Rita in 1983. She played a working-class hairdresser in her 20s who goes to university. Her English literature course is taught by a jaded, bad-mannered lecturer (Michael Caine), and the pair are drawn to each other’s very different lives and attitudes.
Almost 20 years later, she was nominated for her role in Billy Elliot. Julie was in the depths of menopause when filming what is probably her most iconic role, the beleaguered dance teacher of a local child prodigy, set against the mining strikes of 1980s England. She admitted later she was overwhelmed for much of the filming of the movie, often having to sneak off to have a cry, because she found it so hard to concentrate and remember her lines. The end of menopause was life-changing, she says, offering this advice: “Cut sugar and alcohol right down. Red meat and too much carbohydrate make you sweat. Live as healthily as you can. If you can get through it healthily, you’ll have so much more energy at the end of it.”
Julie’s been a household name for several generations of movie-goers, from her role in Calendar Girls to
Mrs Weasley in the Harry Potter films that spanned over a decade. “I do still want to act; I get a lot out of it. [But] I feel relaxed in many ways. There isn’t
“I don’t want to have to break my heart on stage every night.”
that thing of having to establish yourself.”
Julie’s been outspoken about the fact that workingclass actors these days face a steeper battle than she did. “People like me wouldn’t be able to go to college today; I got a full grant. I don’t know how you get into it now,” she says. “Kids write to me all the time and I think, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’” Not only is it affecting who gets the chance to have a shot in the movies, it’s also affecting who gets to write the movies, she says. “Working-class kids aren’t represented. Workingclass life is not referred to. It’s really sad. I think it means we’re going to get loads more middle-class drama.
It will be middle-class people playing working-class people.”
When Julie switched from nursing – respectable and dependable – to acting, her mother, Mary, was appalled. Mary was from Ireland and had the relentless drive of the first-generation immigrant. The message of Julie’s childhood was: “You’ve got to prove yourself.” As a result, praise for her career success was never that forthcoming until it was too late.
When Mary died in 1989, there was proof she had been proud all along.
“It wasn’t until after she died and I was clearing out her flat that I found a huge pile of newspaper articles she had kept about me,” Julie says.
“She had been cataloguing my career, but it just wasn’t the sort of thing she would say – although when she came to the premiere of Educating Rita, she pointed me out to a policeman and said, ‘That’s my daughter,’ so I think she must have been proud.”
Julie’s own daughter, Maisie, hasn’t followed in her mother’s footsteps, but the pair are close.
Away from her showbusiness life, Julie slips easily into her other role as a farmer’s wife. “If I said, ‘I’m not doing it [acting] any more, he’d probably be relieved,’” she laughs of her husband’s attitude. “He’s never said give up, because he knows it’s important to me, but the main thing we talk about is farming.”
She relishes the anonymity of life in the country. “You don’t realise till it’s gone how precious it [anonymity] is.” When she is recognised, it changes how people communicate with her.
“They see you as something that you’re not – ‘an actress’, ‘famous’, and that brings with it some kind of weird aura that isn’t real. People don’t respond to you as a real person, and I hate that.”