Julie Walters: ‘People like me wouldn't get a chance today'
Version 0 of 1. Julie Walters lies back on the sofa, kicks a shapely leg in the air and says she couldn’t be happier to be a pensioner. She’s coming up to 65 and that suits her just fine. She looks younger, more glam, than when we last met. Then, Walters was in her early 50s, quick to tell you she was mid-menopause and flushing all over the show. Some of the joy had gone out of life. She wasn’t sure if she was long for the acting world, even though she was in the middle of an astonishing run. In the noughties, she virtually made the Bafta her own. Every year, there she was, propping up the podium, thanking all and sundry – for her no-nonsense dance teacher in Billy Elliot (2000), the mother of a young man with leukaemia in My Beautiful Son (2001), another grieving mother in Murder (2002) and her brilliant metamorphosis into the dying Mo Mowlam (2010) – passionate, funny, filthy, terrified and utterly moving. Mo was a defining moment for Walters. She shaved her head to play the part, and her hair grew back completely white. She had been dyeing it for decades and it came as a shock. “It really rammed it home: I’m 60. I was absolutely fascinated by it. I thought, I could retire now.” Genuinely? “Yes, there was a relief to it. It was utterly liberating.” It put everything into perspective, she says. She’d had a great career, she didn’t need to prove anything: it was time to relax. She took a year off and pottered around. She went to shows and took delight in slapping down her senior citizen card. “I’ll have my concessions! I’d go to the V&A. ‘Senior!’” she barks to an imaginary attendant. “The movies. ‘Senior!’ I thought, ‘You know what? I’m not sure that I’m bothered if nothing comes in.’” But sure enough, the work did come in. She took a part at the National Theatre in The Last Of The Haussmans and found she had a new hunger for acting. “I thought, no, I do still want to act. I get a lot out of it. I felt relaxed in many ways. There wasn’t that thing of having to establish yourself.” From the beginning, she had huge belief in her work. “I thought I was the best. I thought nobody’s anywhere near. If people didn’t want me for the job – pleeeease! They’re not worth working with, then. I did have that attitude.” Was she like that in all walks of life? “No, only in acting. Other bits I had no confidence. But it built my self-esteem, it helped me. I just felt, nobody’s going to do it like me, and of course that’s true of all actors. Nobody is going to do it like them.” Walters has always been a superb comic. Over the past 30 years, Victoria Wood has created a number of unforgettable characters for her, from ancient tea lady Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques to batty down-and-out Petula Gordino in Dinnerladies. A wonderful 1980s sketch called Two Soups highlighted Walters’ gift for physical comedy: playing a geriatric waitress, the humour is not so much in what Walters says as in her head-nodding, hand-shaking, cross-legged, tortoise-paced walk. But the main body of her work has been political, often in an instinctive rather than a polemical way. She has tended to play working-class characters, whether striving (the hairdresser turned mature English student in Educating Rita) or battered by Thatcherism (her almost-but-not-quite-defeated Angie in Boys From The Blackstuff). There was such hope when she started out, Walters says. “It felt like a revolution, like being on the frontline of something. It felt like you were doing something ground-breaking, things like Blackstuff and working at the Everyman.” Things were becoming fairer? “In terms of class, yes, definitely. And that started in the 50s. Michael Caine and all those people. And it’s going back the other way now.” If she was starting out now, she doesn’t think she’d have a chance. “People like me wouldn’t have been able to go to college today. I could because I got a full grant. I don’t know how you get into it now. Kids write to me all the time and I think, I don’t know what to tell you.” The lack of opportunity is not simply limiting the people coming into the acting profession, she says, it’s restricting what’s being written. “Working-class kids aren’t represented. Working-class 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, like it used to be.” Walters grew up in Smethwick, the youngest of three children born to Thomas Walters, a builder and decorator, and Mary Bridget O’Brien – a tiny, fierce Irishwoman for whom nothing was quite good enough. Mary had been the brightest girl at school, but left without qualifications, and escaped her family farm for England. There she met Thomas and found work in a pub and a factory, but resented it (“My father never went in a shebeen in his life,” Walters says, in her mother’s most contemptuous voice). Eventually, Mary got a job in the civil service, working as a clerical assistant for the Post Office. Not bad, but if she was sure of one thing, it was that her children would achieve more. “She had that immigrant thing, ‘You’ve got to prove yourself’,” Walters says. “She had huge drive.” So when Walters and her two brothers did well at school, she told them they hadn’t done well enough. Walters was a talented runner – at 16, she was 200m champion for Worcestershire. When she came third in the Birmingham schools 200m, she was scared to tell her mother. (“As it happens, she said, ‘Ah, it doesn’t matter.’ That was the only time she ever said that, so it really marked something for me.”) When her eldest brother Tommy got a PhD from Cambridge in theology, her mother still wasn’t satisfied. Walters imitates her: “Well, you know, he did theology – what good is that?” The only time Walters remembers her mother showing any pride in their achievements was when she took up nursing. But after three years she’d had enough, and announced that she wanted to act. Her mother told her she would end up on the streets. It didn’t quite work out that way. Walters studied English and drama at Manchester Poly and went on to work at Liverpool’s Everyman theatre. It was a fantastic time, alive with possibility and empowered working-class voices. Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell were writers in residence, and both wrote for Walters. She worked with the explosive talent that was Pete Postlethwaite. There was a real sense that their time had come. She and Postlethwaite, who died in 2011, lived together for five years in the 70s. They worked hard, drank hard, and thought anything was possible. She says he was one of the greatest actors she’s worked with, prepared to tear himself apart in the name of his art. “I remember him doing Coriolanus at the Everyman and his mother saying, ‘Oh Peter, you’ll go round the bend if you carry on like that.’” I tell her I once interviewed him, and after God knows how many pints of Guinness, he hammered me at pool. She smiles. “Well, a few Guinnesses was never going to put him off. I mean, Jesus, I used to have four before we went on the pub shows we did up there. I’d be dead if I drank that now. I have absolutely no interest in drinking, apart from when I’m on Graham Norton or at the Baftas.” When she was young, she says, the culture was different – everybody drank loads, actors were expected to. If she had stayed with Postlethwaite, would she have ended up an alcoholic? “No. No. Because I remember thinking, I don’t want to keep up with this. I became allergic to yeast – wine and beer are really bad. I thought everybody got flu symptoms after they drank, and then I realised I was allergic.” It wasn’t just the drinking she couldn’t keep up with; it was the intensity of their relationship. “He was great, but it wasn’t right for us eventually. If I’m with an actor, I’m worried about their work as well. You can never get away from it. That wasn’t for me.” What was she like politically? “Confused, in many ways. Ignorant to begin with. Then gradually I thought of myself as leftwing. Whether I was is another matter.” She gives an example of her confusion. “When I first went up to college, my boyfriend, who was much better educated and more intelligent than me, said, ‘There’s an anti-apartheid demonstration and we should go on that.’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘What, you condone apartheid, do you?’ I had to get the dictionary and look up condone and then look up apartheid.” She laughs, then comes to a sudden stop, worried she’s told me this story before. She has only so many stories, she says, and she worries she’s repeating herself. Walters is a funny, likable mix. Watch her on a TV chatshow and she seems born to celebrity – outgoing, relaxed, gossipy. She admits this is part of her – she does like people, and she loves entertaining. But there is also an intensely private side. The Walters who lives on a farm in West Sussex with husband Grant Roffey, surrounded by pigs, sheep, cows and chickens; the Walters who worried herself sick when her only daughter Maisie contracted leukaemia at the age of two (she is now well, and grown-up) and vowed not to work weekends and never to stay away from home longer than necessary. It’s 30 years since she got together with Roffey. How they met is a story she has told before – and it’s a Walters classic. She was out boozing with her best friend Ros at a posh bar in London, packed with “Hooray Henry yah-yahing”. At the top of her voice, she said to Ros, “I bet nobody here votes Labour.” A handsome man turned around and said he did. That was Roffey, eight years her junior and then an AA patrolman. Walters says it was lust at first sight – he walked her home, offered to look at her broken washing machine, dropped on to all fours and told her she probably needed a pump. In her autobiography, she writes, “I mistook his meaning, not realising that he was referring to the appliance, and I ran the full length of the room towards him, propelled by an irresistible urge, and leapt, laughing with drunken glee, on to his back.” And that was that. Walters loves talking dirty, but ask an innocuous question about family life and she cradles her head in anguish. Has she been unkind? Betrayed the family? Been indiscreet? Then she worries some more, that she’s been too unforthcoming, too private. She says it is important to her that Roffey works outside showbusiness. “If I said, I’m not doing it any more, he’d probably be relieved. He’s never said give up, because he knows it’s important to me, but the main thing we talk about is farming.” How would a typical conversation go? “It’s usually about farm machinery that’s gone wrong. Or I remember saying, ‘Bloody hell, those turkeys look as if they’ve been brought up next to a nuclear plant, they’re absolutely mammoth.’ Or we’ll talk about the farmers’ markets. I find it therapeutic because I’m not involved in it. I’m like a sleeping partner. It definitely balances up life, because it’s a completely different world. It’s about the elements, the cycle of life. I love that.” Is she known as the farmer’s wife? “No, it is a smallish community. People are used to me. They know who I am.” They don’t care that she’s an actor. “Anonymity is so important. You just don’t realise till it’s gone how precious it is.” When you’re well known, she says, people talk to you differently. “They see you for something that you’re not – ‘an actress’, ‘famous’ – and that brings with it some kind of weird aura that is not real. People don’t respond to you as a real person, and I hate that.” Anyway, that’s enough of that, she says. She can’t complain; people might stop her in the street but they are invariably lovely. She returns to politics – the subject that really interests her. Yes, she says, she was interested as a young woman in social justice, but it was also cool to be a lefty. “In those days it was very fashionable to be a student, to be working class, to be leftwing. I have to be honest and say that was very much part of it. But I definitely felt angered when I started to find out through my boyfriend about the inequalities of life, which I’d never noticed, particularly.” Michael Caine said that when she was playing opposite him in Educating Rita, she seemed angry about the world. “I know! I think he’s probably right, old Michael, to have picked that up. Yes! Probably still youthful anger at deep stuff, like your mum not approving of you, not being good enough, that sort of anger. Then you can channel that into your politics.” But there are times, you sense, that she feels she hasn’t been angry enough. I ask who are her favourite actors she’s worked with; she names Ian Charleson, who died of Aids when he was only 40, Postlethwaite, Jim Broadbent, Helen McCrory, Rory Kinnear and Helen Mirren. Then she says something interesting about Mirren, with whom she appeared in Calendar Girls. “I loved her. I just really liked her as a person. Cos we’re completely the opposite. I admire her strength. While I’m dithering about, she’ll cut through shit.” I’m surprised she is so dismissive of herself. “I think I have got strength,” she says, “but it is a different sort of thing.” I tell her that Bleasdale once said she had a spine of tungsten steel. She looks delighted. “You see! I’d love it to be true. I think he’s seen me in times of adversity, and seen that I’ve come through.” She has noticed herself changing over the years, though. In 2008, she played Mary Whitehouse in a BBC docudrama, and was surprised to find that by the end she sympathised with Whitehouse. “I could see why she’d be frightened about what was happening in life. And she’s right: there does have to be a censor, there does have to be a watershed. Kids shouldn’t be watching people raping and shagging each other.” She pauses, to take in what she’s just said. “Ooh, we loathed her in my day. She was my mother’s generation and at 21 I thought she was a fucking old cow, the epitome of everything we were against – anti-everything, an old Tory, reactionary.” Last year Walters became only the 12th woman to have received a fellowship, the highest honour the British Academy of Film and Television Arts can bestow. Her mother died in 1989, but surely this would have impressed her. Did her mother ever tell her how proud she was? “Nooooah,” she says with a lovely smile. “She’d never say anything like that. And that’s fine. I know she was.” If I’d asked that question 40 years ago, would she have answered so lovingly? “No. There would have still been anger there. There’s not now. I understand her far more than when she was still here.” Nowadays she and Tommy talk about what their mother did for them; how they would almost certainly not have achieved so much without her push. After her mother died, Walters discovered a box of newspaper clippings her mother had kept, chronicling her success. Her anger towards her mother might have faded, but she’s more politically fired up than ever. “I’m worried about Labour,” she announces. “It’s all so close now. It’s not like it was in the old days. They’re almost the bloody same, aren’t they? Don’t you think? I will vote Labour but…” She trails off dispiritedly “God knows what’s going to happen if the Tories get in and there are more cuts. I think there’ll be civil unrest, that’s what I think. There will be a need for it.” I ask her for the Walters dream manifesto. “I’d invest in the NHS and get our manufacturing back.” And create more opportunities for actors from her background? “I’d create proper grants for all working-class kids so they could go to drama school.” Walters has just played the stern housekeeper Mrs Bird in the adaptation of Michael Bond’s Paddington – a good political story, she says. “It gives out a really positive message about inclusion and tolerance. He’s a refugee, basically. Peter Capaldi plays the neighbour and he says, ‘Before long the street will be crawling with them. Let one in…’ It’s all the old cliched prejudices about people coming into the country.” Next up, she’s in the movie adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn – another story about the immigrant experience. But first she’s starring in Channel 4’s epic Raj-time drama Indian Summers, as the manipulative Cynthia, a working-class former good-time girl who has the ruling classes wrapped around her little finger. I tell her I enjoyed what I’ve seen of Indian Summers, but I’d love to see her in something truly inflammatory and resonant – say, a modern-day Boys From The Blackstuff. She nods enthusiastically. “I think it will come round again if things go the way they are going. People aren’t angry enough yet.” But they are getting there, and not a moment too soon. “They’d better get on with it,” she says, “because I’m 65 in February.” • Indian Summers airs on Channel 4 in February. Images shot for the Guardian Stylist: Mika Handley. Hair and make-up: Chrissie Baker. All clothes: catherinewalker.com. Jewellery: LinksofLondon.com; follifollie.co.uk. Shot on location at St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, stpancrasrenaissance.co.uk |