Julie Walters review: Warm tales leave you wanting more

Published on Thursday 9 October 2008 09:59

Julie Walters Royal **** Lyceum MOLLY WEASLEY, Annie Clarke, Mrs Overall. These and many more are just some of the unforgettable characters created by one of Britain's most beloved actresses, Julie Walters.

Her fans are many, varied and vocal, and a good few hundred of them turned up at the Lyceum Theatre yesterday evening to hear her speak about her life and, more pertinently, her autobiography, That's Another Story, published this month. Janice Forsyth, clearly a bit of a fan herself, interviewed her for almost an hour for the live audience, in a show being broadcast later for BBC Scotland.

If there was a fault with the event, it was simply that it was too short. Then again, the point of the show was to publicise and tease the content of her book, which it did remarkably well: the book signing queue afterwards was healthy enough to guarantee Walters a bad dose of writer's cramp for days to come.

Every pair of ears in the auditorium was pricked up, listening to every word and anecdote. Forsyth suggested that the act of writing her thoughts down must have encouraged even more memories to surface. More than this, Walters noted that while recalling stories of her early family life, she suddenly realised that she had been drawing subconsciously on the character of her maternal grandmother, Bridget, for many of her older women roles, in particular, Acorn Antiques' Mrs Overall.

Her mother, she remembered, was against the idea of her going into acting, despite which, Walters considered her one of the driving forces in her career. Laughing with the audience as she spoke, she described her mother as something of a drama queen who, annually on Walters' birthday, would retell the story of her daughter's difficult birth, always finishing the dramatic tale with an impassioned, "I nearly died!"

Mimicking her mother's Irish brogue, the love and warmth Walters felt for her family was clear, as was her regional pride. More than once she had been asked to modify her accent, and she always refused. "I could never get the hang of short vowels", she said, now successfully using them in examples.

Despite her achievements, Walters comes across as completely unaffected.

Describing herself as over-confident in acting, and under-confident in everything else, she easily won the hearts of the audience with her self-deprecating humour.

In one reading from her autobiography, she remembered buying a pair of boots and wearing them too long on the first day. She felt her feet swelling up and couldn't get them off. By this time she was herself a famous actress, but couldn't quite get over the fact that Liza Minnelli came into the room, helped her remove the boots, then sought out and applied plasters and antiseptic to her bleeding, aching feet.

Following the main interview, the audience were asked for questions. It emerged that Marie Stubbs from Ahead Of The Class was her most fulfilling role to date, while Alan Bennett and Alan Bleasdale were among the most interesting people she knew. For this audience, Julie Walters was ten times more interesting than both of them put together.