Julie Walters
“I Cried When I Saw Myself On Screen”
In 1980, an unknown actress took to the London stage in a production of Educating Rita, about a hairdresser who enrols at university to try to improve her life. So good was her performance, Julie Walters won the Variety Critics’ and London Critics’ Circle awards.
Three years later, Julie reprised her role on the silver screen, this time earning a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination. Not that Julie thinks she earned them…
“When I first saw the film, I went into the toilets and cried,” she revealed. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, is that what I look like?’ I thought I was terrible in and find it difficult to watch.”
Cinema viewers disagreed and she became a success very quickly, and Julie had already met and started working with Victoria Wood, with whom she became a household name.
It’s hard to believe she almost went down a different career path altogether. Julie, most recently seen in Mary
PoppinsReturns, originally trained to be a nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. “I loved being with the patients so much, washing them, feeding them, telling them jokes, stealing 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.”
What was ideal was Julie’s natural comedy talent. Giving up nursing, she studied Drama at Manchester Polytechnic, where she met Victoria Wood.
The pair’s television series WoodAndWalters may have only lasted one series, but their friendship was built to last and they worked together on other series throughout their careers.
In 2016, Victoria passed away and it’s a loss Julie may never get over. Speaking after her friend’s death, Julie revealed she talks to a photo of Victoria. “Sometimes, when there’s nobody around, I look at it and say, ‘Where are you?’ I still find it difficult to take in.”
As devastated as Julie and the British public were about Victoria’s passing, Julie’s success has not been limited to her work with her comedy pal.
From BillyElliot to Harry Potter and MammaMia!, Julie has been so busy that she announced recently she’s taking a year off. “Scripts come my way, but it has to be something I really want because mostly I prefer being at home,” she said. “It’s the place where I feel happiest. I’m taking this year off, really. I’m doing voiceovers, but I want a rest because the last two or three years have been non-stop and I didn’t feel very well last year, I was exhausted.”
Apart from recharging her batteries, Julie wants to spend more time with her husband, Grant Roffey, and – save from voicing the Queen in new animated movie TheQueen’s Corgi – she will have plenty of free time to spend with him.
Julie first met Grant in 1985, when she was a little worse for wear in a London pub, trying to cope with being in the spotlight. “I was getting slaughtered on champagne and not having any kind of domestic life – until I met Grant and it just stopped.”
The day she met him, Julie drunkenly surveyed the posh clientele in the bar and shouted, “I bet there’s nobody here who votes Labour!”
Grant did. They hit it off and
I want a rest; the last few years have been non-stop and I’m exhausted!
went on to get married, in 1997.
The couple have a daughter, Maisie, who Julie is extremely close to because Maisie had been very unwell as a child. When Maisie was just two, she had lymphoblastic leukaemia, a potentially fatal condition affecting one in 20,000 children aged between two and 10.
Julie said, “She means the world to me. The relationship between us is very intense, what with nearly losing her.”
No doubt Maisie and Grant would both have been proud when Julie became a Dame in 2017, awarded an OBE. “I felt very lucky to receive it from the Queen, as she doesn’t do many these days,” Julie said, but also added she won’t use her title. “I’d never do that!” she said. “It’s just a nice thing to have. You don’t carry Baftas around with you, do you?”