LOVE, LAUGHTER – AND ENVY
Soulmates for 40 years, no one will grieve more for Victoria Wood than Julie Walters. The tale of their friendship — and how it was tested when Julie cracked Hollywood — is as funny and poignant as any of their comedy hits
ONE was a Hollywood star, the other a shy writer who would hide herself away to indulge in eating binges. But their friendship spanned 40 years and, in the minds of the public, Julie Walters and Victoria Wood were inseparable.
For other TV comedy duos — most famously Peter Cook and Dudley Moore — no bond, however strong, can survive meteoric success for just one partner.
When Julie was catapulted to international fame in 1983, starring opposite Michael Caine and winning an Oscar nomination for Educating Rita, her friendship with Victoria was tested to the core.
Though it ultimately withstood the tensions dragging their careers in such different directions, that friendship did suffer — a fact that Victoria Wood, who died this week from cancer aged just 62, was too forthright and honest to ignore.
‘I did become jealous,’ she admitted. ‘I was very insecure, and I did have a pang about it. I felt I was being compared with her and found wanting.’
Until she underwent therapy in her 40s, she would eat ‘to blot out the moment’ — shutting herself away from other people and scoffing compulsively ‘the way other people use alcohol and cigarettes’.
Even in their teens, Julie had always been the confident one, the show-off with big ambitions. Victoria was the one hanging back in the wings, being sick.
They first met in 1970 at Manchester Polytechnic’s School Of Theatre, where Julie — who was from Birmingham — was a first-year student tasked with showing a group of applicants round the building before their auditions.
Victoria, just 17, was in awe of the older girl.
Julie was 20, and had already worked at a hospital as a nurse before deciding to train as an actress. She regaled the newbies with gory tales of amputations and gruesome pranks on the wards with all the aplomb of a stand-up comedian working a nightclub.
When it came to her audition, Victoria was, by contrast, too terrified to perform.
She had prepared a series of Shakespearean speeches, including one from Romeo And Juliet, but every time the spotlight touched her she was overcome with stage fright. Perhaps inevitably, she wasn’t chosen.
EIGHT years later, they saw each other again, and Victoria recognised Julie immediately, though, typically, she did not dare say so at first. The two were appearing in a revue of sketches and songs, several of which were written by Wood, called In At The Death, at the Bush Theatre — a stage in a cramped room above a pub in Shepherd’s Bush green, West London.
After a couple of days in rehearsal, the women found themselves talking over a lunch of liver and onions at a cafe round the corner, and Victoria confessed shyly that they’d met before. She remembered every detail of the excruciating day.
‘At first I couldn’t remember,’ admitted Julie, ‘ and then the image of this shy little girl, wearing glasses and throwing up in a bucket, flashed before me.’
They had something else in common: Victoria’s boyfriend (and later husband), geoffrey Durham, a would-be magician who later found success as The great Soprendo, had once been Julie’s neighbour in a house in Liverpool, living in the bedsit downstairs.
Julie sent her new friend into hysterical giggles with a story of how geoffrey, showing off his fire-eating act to her, had set his own beard alight. The friendship was sealed when Victoria, who had just bought a Mini van, offered to give Julie a lift home.
Looking for a short cut, they got hopelessly lost in the Shepherd’s Bush backstreets, and as they attempted a threepoint turn in a cul- de- sac, the van demolished a garden wall. Shrieking with laughter, the two drove away as fast as they could.
In 1974, Victoria had won new Faces with her comedy song routines, and enjoyed a brief residency on BBC1’s consumer affairs show That’s Life.
But she was in awe of Julie’s credentials as a serious actress — her new friend’s last engagement had been at the highbrow Royal Court Theatre.
Julie, for her part, was impressed by the quality of Wood’s writing, especially the audience reaction to a sketch called Sex, in which she played a woman so clueless about intercourse that she convinces herself she’s pregnant, even though she is a virgin.
Mostly, though, their friendship blossomed because they made each other laugh.
One afternoon, hanging out of the upstairs window of the pub where they were performing, they spied Britain’s most celebrated playwright standing at a bus stop over the road.
‘Oi! Harold!’ screeched Julie. ‘ Harold Pinter! I know you, you’re a writer. We need one of them, get yourself up here!’
And while the author of The Caretaker blinked at the two young women, not sure whether he was being commissioned or propositioned, Victoria slowly slid out of sight, helpless with giggles.
Some of their other escapades were even cruder.
The pub theatre had no toilet: patrons had to use the one in the bar downstairs and so did the actors. (Victoria got fed up of hearing her critics while she was spending a penny, and wincing at comments such as: ‘Let’s not stay for the second half.’)
Julie convinced her to use a pint glass as a chamber-pot instead. They would leave the glasses backstage, wait for an actor to reach for one and then hiss: ‘Don’t touch that! It’s not lager.’
After the Bush Theatre run, Julie returned to her more glamourous thespian life, landing the role of Phoebe in Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Bristol Old Vic.
But Victoria didn’t forget her. When she was commissioned to write a play for a young writers’ festival at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, she decided to create the central role for her new friend. She even called the character ‘Julie’.
The play was Talent, the story of a brash, confident girl auditioning at a talent contest, and her shy, dumpy friend Maureen, who comes along for moral support.
Julie was overwhelmed by how well the writer understood her: ‘That part fitted me like a glove. I knew this girl exactly; what she would wear, how she would speak, how she would smoke, cry, laugh, and when she would breathe.’
But, under contract to the Old Vic, she couldn’t perform at the festival. She had to wait two years, and then audition like everyone else, when granada TV commissioned Talent as a one-off drama.
At the auditions, Victoria accompanied her at the piano as she performed two songs, the ones she would sing in this Eighties version of an amateur X Factor.
AS JULIE left the stage, after a strong performance, Victoria whispered: ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to play in the wrong key for everyone else.’ The musical sabotage worked and Julie got the part.
Talent was a critical success. Audiences loved the warm, saucy, northern humour, and lines such as: ‘I always thought coq au vin was love in a lorry.’ granada offered to commission a string of plays about Julie and Maureen. Victoria agreed to do one, titled nearly A Happy Ending, but then refused to write more. ‘I don’t want them to end up like a rehash of The Liver Birds,’ she said.
The pressure of success was already telling on Victoria. She told one journalist that a West End impresario wanted a play and she was trying to write it, but every line was a disaster.
The stage fright that had plagued her as a teen was now re-emerging as a daily fear, when she sat down at the typewriter, that she wouldn’t have a good idea ever again.
Unable to face the thought of
both writing and performing, she created her next play solely for Julie. It was called Happy Since I Met You, about a drama teacher and a struggling actor.
‘It was a gorgeously bittersweet comedy,’ Walters said. ‘Victoria gave me brilliant gift after brilliant gift.’
Under more pressure from Granada, they recorded a six-part sketch show called Wood And Walters, written entirely by Victoria.
It was a patchy affair, not helped by the fact that it was made in front of a studio audience of elderly folk on an outing from a day care centre. Not all of them wanted to be there, and comments drifted up to the stage.
One woman complained to her neighbour: ‘We’re missing Brideshead for this’ — a reference to the costume drama Brideshead Revisited, the Downton Abbey of its day.
The remark became a catchphrase, a private joke between the stars, and more than 20 years later, at a Bafta tribute to Julie Walters in 2003, Victoria leant across and handed her a note just before she stepped on to the stage. It said: ‘We’re missing Brideshead for this.’
Mortified by the reception to Wood And Walters, and determined to have complete control over her material, Victoria retreated for a couple of years to work on her own ideas.
Julie’s reaction was entirely the opposite. She won plaudits for the seminal TV drama Boys From The Blackstuff, and then campaigned for the title role in Willy Russell’s new play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was to open at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden.
The play was called Educating Rita and Julie told anyone who asked: ‘It felt a little like destiny.’
Her cocksure confidence was perfect for the play and, after three months, it transferred to the West End, where it was a smash hit. One night it was seen by film mogul Lewis Gilbert, who had directed three Bond movies and saw the box office potential of Educating Rita.
At first, Paul Newman was considered for the role of mature student Rita’s mentor, a drunken English lecturer. But the part went to Michael Caine, whom Gilbert had directed in the title role of Alfie, in 1966.
America loved Julie. After Educating Rita landed three Oscar nominations, she was invited on the Johnny Carson programme, the biggest chat show in the world. After convulsing its audience with tales of stealing the hotel towels in Hollywood, she became the first woman ever to be invited back within a week.
When she returned to Britain, she nattered casually to friends about her new best friend, actor Burt Reynolds, and how he had promised her the use of his helicopter any time she wanted it.
Victoria, meanwhile, had moved into a flat in Morecambe, Lancashire, with a piano squashed into the front room and a view from the window of a car park crammed with holidaymakers’ hatchbacks.
YET they were working together again within a year. The lure of California’s sunshine and film studios could not match the joy of a Victoria Wood script, every line sanded and polished till it was exactly right.
And this time they would be at the BBC, with a guarantee of professional production.
Victoria Wood As Seen On TV was recorded on a Saturday night, as if it were going out live, and was a hit from the start. One sketch in the first episode is still revered by fans who can recite every word — the kind of heartfelt, if nerdy, tribute more usually accorded to Monty Python and Blackadder.
It featured two diners at a provincial hotel, waiting for a very elderly and shaky waitress (played by Julie) to serve their soup. And it was based, of course, on a real incident, in a seafront restaurant in Morecambe.
The highlight of the show, though, was the spoof soap opera Acorn Antiques,An which starred Celia Imrie as the highly strung manageress and JulieJu as the decrepit cleaner, Mrs Overall,Ov always ready with ‘ a nice cupcu of tea’ and a macaroon.
TheT original Acorn Antiques ran for just 12 five-minute episodes, but it b became so beloved that fans would holdho conventions, dressing up as theth characters.
InI 2005, it opened as a musical at theth Theatre Royal, Haymarket, where JulieJu reprised the role of Mrs Overall fivefiv nights a week. For the other two performancespe Victoria took over, tellingtel audiences that the real Mrs O ‘is at the bingo’.
JulieJ was the only actress who was permittedpe to mess around with Victoria’sVic finely crafted dialogue.
ImrieI admitted that, if she got a wordwo out of place, she would be scolded,sc but Julie’s changes went uncorrectedun — because the telepathic understandingun between writer and HollywoodHo star was so attuned that theyth both knew just how the lines shouldsh be said.
InI 1998, Victoria wrote dinnerladies, setse in a Northern works canteen. She tookto the lead, as Bren, lovelorn and piningpin for the manager, Tony Martin.
TheT sitcom revolved around the lonely,lon frustrated lives of the women whowh cooked the meals. But there was a ad different role for Julie — as Bren’s selfish,se manipulative, thoroughly disgracefuldi mother, who lives in a caravanca nearby.
VictoriaV asked, with slight trepidation,tre whether Julie would mindm playing her 55-year-old mum, and Walters shrieked with laughter at the idea: ‘ People think I’m 55 anyway, I’m not bothered.’
SHE had guessed, rightly, that the best dialogue in the show would all be hers. ‘ We had scene after scene together, where she gave me all the best lines and simply stood there, more or less as a feed,’ said Julie.
‘She has been unutterably generous in her writing. I have often said that, had I her talent for writing, I wouldn’t be giving those punchlines to anyone else. But that’s Victoria.’
For Wood, though, writing was a painful business . . . and talking about it was even harder. She was once coaxed, by Michael Parkinson on his chat show in 2001, to explain why she liked writing for Julie.
‘It’s mystical,’ she said. ‘Technically, she’s so superb, you can write anything for her. It’s like a concert pianist — you don’t give her Chopsticks, you give her something really difficult.
‘She doesn’t mind being unlikable. Most comedians like to play favourable parts, but she’s not bothered about that. She’ll black her teeth up and look old. She doesn’t care.’
But perhaps Victoria had already told the world how she really felt about the friend who had soared to worldwide fame and financial success while she stayed in Lancashire.
In 1994, she had written another TV play, Pat & Margaret, about two sisters who meet for the first time in decades. Julie plays a wealthy actress in a hit American soap; Victoria the cook at a British motorway service station.
After a TV show (a send-up of Cilla Black’s Surprise Surprise) brings them together, the sisters have a colossal falling-out. Each one resents the other’s life, even though neither could stand to swap places.
Gradually, they come to accept each other’s choices, though Pat keeps trying to coax Margaret to come to America. Eventually, she gives up . . . and takes their mother instead. ‘They’re very big at the moment,’ says Pat, ‘celebrity mums.’
It’s the quintessential Victoria Wood line — said as only Julie Walters could deliver it.