JULIE WALTERS: HER HIDDEN HEARTBREAK
A spoonful of sugar
THE SOONTO-BE MARY POPPINS STAR KNOWS THE HEARTACHE OF FAMILY ILLNESS
As hospital bedside companions go, you’d be hard-pushed to think of a better one than Julie Walters. After all, in more than four decades of entertaining us on screen, stage and wherever else she pops up, the actress has proved herself to be a kind of medicine in human form – full of life, mischief, wisdom and natter. Ten minutes in her company and anyone would feel better.
It doesn’t come as much surprise then to learn that
Julie’s particular strength during her brief days as a student nurse was doing just that – cheering people up.
“Oh, I loved being with the patients so much,” she says. “I loved washing them, feeding them, telling them jokes, stealing all their grapes – the whole lot. I was very good at making them laugh, but
unfortunately
terrified of everything else the job involved. That’s not ideal!”
In Birmingham in 1968, having been asked to leave school early due to persistent trouble-making (“they told me I was subversive and I distinctly remember having to look it up in the dictionary”), Julie appeased her Irish mother by signing up for nursing training as an 18-year-old.
The camaraderie at the nurses’ home was splendid, but once on the ward – where she flitted between the casualty, ophthalmology and coronary departments – procedures petrified her, as did the thought of anyone having “some sort of attack” on her watch.
Still, there was plenty of drama for a future actress to call on. She tells a particularly fine story of a patient with a frying-pan handle lodged in an intimate place.
“He said he had an itch!” she cackles. And, of course, the hospital had a willing captive audience for her to practise on.
“Well, they were quite literally captive, really, weren’t they? Stuck in those beds, forced to listen to me,” she says. “I’d wait until the senior nurse went off for her cup of tea and then do my bit of stand-up. I fell in love with a lot of the male patients too – the hospital had to ask me to stop writing so many letters to them after they’d left.”
Fun as that was, after 18 months, Julie dropped out to pursue acting in Manchester and didn’t wear a starched uniform again until she played a nurse in Alan Bennett’s Intensive Care, part of the Play for Today series, in 1982.
“It wasn’t a vocation for me, like it was for the others there. I was much, much too immature to be responsible for people’s lives and there were some in the nurses’ home who’d spent 50 years there. The idea filled me with terror. I saw in them a desire and commitment to help people, tackling everything.
I just wouldn’t have coped.” Now 67, she gave up her nursing career long ago, but still maintains a connection to the profession as a patron of Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity, devoted to supporting seriously ill young people – particularly those suffering from epilepsy, rare blood disorders and brain injuries. In addition to offering grants for cashstrapped families caring for a sick child, the charity trains specialist paediatric nurses. There are 52 so far, trying to meet the individual needs of more than 15,000 children at hospitals across the UK.
Julie’s connection is a personal one. In 1990, her only child Maisie – then little more than two years old – contracted acute leukaemia, a cancer of the white blood cells.
“It was completely dreadful and such a shock,” she says, looking back.
“People didn’t know a lot about it at the time and the treatment was just so long.”
Julie and her husband,
Grant Roffey, a former AA patrolman, spent the next four years (Maisie relapsed after two) shuttling their daughter to and from the
Royal Marsden Hospital in London, where Maisie had chemotherapy, until she was given the all-clear shortly after her sixth birthday.
During that period, it was the contribution of the nurses
Julie remembers most clearly.
“They were absolutely the most important thing,” she says. “It’s a totally different job from a doctor’s. They cared in the fullest sense. For children, that meant reading stories, playing with them, reassurance, bathing, feeding. Maisie missed the hospital when she left – she thought it was fantastic there because of the nurses.”
Maisie’s now a fit and healthy 28-year-old working in the charity sector, not far from her parents’ farm in West Sussex. Julie and Grant have lived there – with cows, turkeys and a flirty old ram named Teddy – for more than 20 years, far preferring the pace of life in the country to anything London offers.
She’s currently in production for the Emily Blunt-led Mary Poppins remake, in which she’ll play a “great little housekeeper”.
“Mary Poppins. Now there’s someone who’d make a fine nurse,” Julie gasps.
“Oh, now she’d definitely be a Roald Dahl nurse. She’d just do it all by magic.”
‘ I’d wait until the senior nurse went off for her cup of tea and then do my bit of stand-up’