‘I’d drink four pints before I went on...’

Julie Walters tells Ben Lawrence about her wild past and why, after Victoria Wood’s death, she’s turning her back on comedy

Afew months ago, Julie Walters attended Victoria Wood’s memorial service. As a long-time friend and collaborator, she was asked to make a speech and, at first, she was hesitant.

“I’d paid tribute to Vic so many times over the years that I didn’t want to do it again,” she says. “I wanted to let the work speak for itself.” So she dug out a monologue that Wood had written 30 years before, featuring the director of an awful amateur dramatic production, and performed it, addressing the congregation as if they were the actors. “I was quite pleased with the rehearsal, but there is one thing I have to say,” she boomed, in a voice rich with thespian intent. “It may be Hamlet, but it’s got to be fun, fun, fun.”

An hour in the presence of Julie Walters is indeed fun, fun, fun. At 66, she is compact and beady-eyed, and always looks poised for action – or comedy. More than once recently, she says, she’s been mistaken for Judi Dench. “I don’t mind being compared to her, even if she is 20 years older than me,” she tightens her lips for comic effect. “It must be the short hair. Mind you, young people think 60 and 80 are the same thing.”

Her conversation is punctuated by asides in silly voices – “More water, I ask you?” she says with the crispness of Celia Johnson as she tops up my glass – and she is particularly fond of sending up the pretensions and vanity of actors. Walters is neither pretentious nor vain, and while that makes her charming, it also makes her a rather difficult interviewee. She is so acutely aware of her own foibles, that it is hard to challenge her. She is also unfailingly nice.

“A journalist once said to me: ‘God, I have looked everywhere to try and find somebody saying something s----- about you.’ I said, ‘Blimey, that’s a nice job you’ve got...’”

This month, Walters returns to our screens in National Treasure, a Channel 4 drama that dishes the dirt on a fictional TV celebrity, Paul Finchley, played by Robbie Coltrane. The much-loved star of a hit Nineties sitcom, Finchley is arrested for historic sex crimes dating back 25 years. Walters plays his wife Marie, tough, long-suffering and staunchly Catholic, who (in the first episode at least) stands by him, though the expression in her gimlet eyes suggests she would rather kill him. Written by Jack Thorne, whose Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is drawing large crowds in the West End, National Treasure is a stylish, unsettling piece that will put viewers in mind of Operation Yewtree and the seemingly endless allegations of abuse involving highprofile entertainers that followed the Jimmy Savile scandal.

“It’s nothing like Savile,” cautions Walters. “It doesn’t have a message – it just looks at the impact of this happening when you’re a celebrity. It doesn’t try to say anything directly about the climate. It’s more subtle than that and that’s what makes it interesting.”

Walters, 66, came up through the ranks of the industry at a time when celebrities were treated like gods and their sexual proclivities left unremarked. Although she tells me her experiences as a young actress never crossed into the darker side of the business – that, for example, she never had to visit the casting couch – she doesn’t doubt that that sort of thing went on. Always socially minded, she found a sense of purpose in subsidised theatre, touring schools and pubs in a van full of actors that also included Matthew Kelly, Bill Nighy and her then-boyfriend Pete Postlethwaite.

“I’d read The Female Eunuch, I was on the pill and I felt like I was in the middle of a theatrical revolution,” she says. “My first professional job was with Vanload [the touring side of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre], and we did shows in pubs, really rough pubs. I’d have four pints of Guinness before I went on. You didn’t think about it in those days.

“I loved the feeling that this was theatre for the community we were performing in. You’d go into these pubs and there would be a few surly dockers sitting there and one would go ‘ Who the f--- are these?’ and another would go ‘It’s the longhaireds from the Everyman.’ But they were OK, I used to sit on their laps with my mic. My Shirley Bassey

‘They called it a partnership, but it was all Vic’: with Victoria Wood in 1980