Take a chance on me

Published on Wednesday 1 October 2008 11:14

JULIE WALTERS HAS SPENT SO MUCH time in the nation's living rooms over the last 20 years that we all feel we know her.

She may have played her share of unsympathetic or unsavoury characters, but it's a motley crew of lovable, usually garrulous and often eccentric women that tend to spring to mind at the mention of her name: the philosophy-spouting and accident-prone Mrs Overall from Acorn Antiques (her favourite role), the name-dropping fantasist Petula in Dinnerladies, the gobby Open University student in Educating Rita and, most recently, the cheery Mrs Weasley in the Harry Potter movies.

It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find that not only is Walters much less chatty (and much more normal) than her screen alter egos but also that she is considerably less animated – at least when she's being herself. A conversation with the 58-year-old actress regarded as something of a national institution ("that makes me sound like I'm open to coach parties", she likes to quip) is inevitably stuffed with little acted-out monologues and dialogues as she slips into character. But in between times, she is an extremely thoughtful interviewee who considers her every answer and doesn't waste words going over stories she has already told in great detail in her new book.

That book – for which she reportedly received 1.6 million, the highest fee ever paid for a celebrity memoir in the UK – is entitled That's Another Story, and it chronicles Walters's life from her own birth up to that of her now 20-year-old daughter Maisie. The autobiography may only cover 38 years but Walters has packed more than most people manage into her time.

The book ends before the most dramatic chapter of Walters's life – the three-year period during Maisie's early life when she was desperately ill with leukaemia – and it's utterly devoid of mud-slinging (no juicy scandals here), insinuations and revelations. Unless you count a particularly hilarious story about Liza Minnelli helping her out of white cowboy boots, in the toilets of a famous London disco in 1983.

In other words, it's hardly your typical celebrity memoir. It doesn't shed much light on Walters's six-year relationship with fellow actor Pete Postlethwaite or on the heavy drinking during her early years in the spotlight. Nevertheless, it is, as the actress's first famous creation Rita might have said, "a bloody good read", thanks to her bawdy

sense of humour, comic timing, eye for the absurd and her natural flair as a storyteller. Of course, it helps that, as you read it, you automatically hear her familiar Brummie voice chatting away to you.

Although she comes across as a natural writer, Walters found it extremely difficult to get started on the project. Mind you, her previous book – a novel, Maggie's Tree, which was published to impressive reviews in 2006 – had taken a decade to complete. With her memoir, she didn't have the luxury of time, having promised her agent she would turn it around more quickly. She got started last January, notched up 13,000 words, then went off to film for the rest of year.

This January, when Walters had recovered from filming, back-to-back, two completely contrasting projects – Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story and Mamma Mia!, her agent called and told her the final manuscript was expected in June. A further 100,000 words were required. Walters panicked.

At this point in the story, she lowers her voice and goes into conspiratorial mode lest the shadowy figure in the bedroom part of the hotel suite should hear her. Tripping over her own sentences, she whispers: "Bob, the guy who drives me about – he's driven me about for years, it's nice to have the same person ... that's him through there – well, he was in the car with me, taking me up to the Harry Potter set, and he'd heard the conversation. He asked me how much I still had to write, and then worked out how many words I could do in a week and how many I could do in a day. He made me realise that I could do it. I felt so much better. There had been a sort of fear of writing – I kept on putting it off."

For six months, she stayed at home on the farm where she lives with her husband, Grant, and Maisie, and worked on her book. It proved to be an extremely therapeutic experience – and even exorcised a major demon that had haunted her for much of her life: when she was ten years old, Walters and three of her friends were sexually assaulted on the way to their convent school. Fed up waiting for the bus, they had begun playing in the overgrown garden of an empty house next to the bus stop when a man chased them, cornered them and molested them as he reproached them for trespassing.

"I felt quite sick writing that part of the book," she admits. "I've talked about that incident before but it was still suppressed in a way because it happened when I was ten, and you can't assimilate what's happened to you at that age. So writing about it at my age, I could see – oh God, it was horrible – I could see his plan: he was obviously looking for somewhere to take us. I hadn't even thought of that then; it would have been perfect if it hadn't been for the people waiting for the bus outside it. Thank God for those people!"

What makes Walters's account of the ordeal so gripping is the way she evokes very typical childhood fears, the main one being that she was going to get into trouble, rather than what this man might do to her. As a result of her own guilt – at playing in the garden, and at not wearing the obligatory school beret ("a reportable offence") – and her fear of the nuns' reaction to her transgressions, she didn't tell her parents or teachers what had happened, and for years afterwards she suffered from night terrors. Would she have been taken seriously anyway? And would her parents have been able to deal with it?

Rather than answer, Walters immediately assumes her mother's reproachful Irish voice and sternly asks: "What were you doing in the garden? I told you not to speak to strangers. And you didn't have your beret on!"

Her mother was a formidable force and, as she wrote the book, Walters realised they shared more character traits than she had previously realised. "She was driven to achieve and I used to be driven in that way. I think we're also alike in terms of a low self-esteem." Walters's mother comes across as a permanently disapproving character for whom none of her daughter's efforts was ever good enough. Their relationship hit an all-time low when Walters, with the support (physical as well as emotional) of one of her brothers, announced to her mum that she was giving up nursing – the career her mother had dreamt of for her – to pursue her own long-cherished dream of acting.

Despite her fury over her rebellious daughter's change of career, Mrs Walters was there, at the royal premiere of Educating Rita, when the Duke of Edinburgh turned to her daughter during the closing titles and gave her a huge thumbs up and a cheeky wink. Surely her mum must have been bursting with pride? "Yes," says Walters reflectively, "I think she probably was – but she would never have said so."

With age and the birth of her own daughter, Walters has come to understand her mother and what made her the way she was. "She was frightened and insecure – she was Irish and an immigrant, in that sense, so she worried that she wouldn't fit in. She had this feeling of not being good enough, and I think she passed that on to us: whatever you did, it wasn't good enough." Looking back, Walters also acknowledges that her mother had a tough life. "She had three children, all young, plus my grandma to deal with. And she worked. And there was me wetting the bed, and grandma wetting her chair..."

Ah, yes, grandma. Walters's portrait of her dementia-afflicted, dentally-challenged grandmother is hugely entertaining but also very poignant and affectionate – and, like some of the stories from her nursing days, could easily have come from the pages of a Peter Tinniswood book or a James Thurber short story or, of course, a sketch by her long-time friend and colleague Victoria Wood. Grandma, after all, was a woman who would argue vociferously with the TV, and once stormed out of the room after she thought she'd been flashed at by a male ballet dancer in flesh-toned tights on the telly.

"Grandma was definitely a springboard," she admits. "I've always been drawn to playing older women and I think that is to do with her. She was a massive influence. It's fascinating how humans age, what age they get to, how their voices change. They become like young kids again."

With her talent for playing older women and her way with an accent, Walters has a lot in common with Meryl Streep, so it was interesting to watch them together in Mamma Mia!: two supremely intelligent actresses (both rivals for the 1984 Best Actress Oscar) working together for the first time – in what is probably the dumbest movie of the year.

Walters didn't even wait for her agent to tell her the name of the film when she accepted her role as one of the two comic sidekicks. "He said, 'How would you like to play Meryl Streep's friend in...' and I just said, 'Yes! I don't care what it is – I'll do it.'" Walters had a ball making the film last summer in Greece and she, Streep and Christine Baranski – the third member of the trio – got on like a house on fire. So much so that after filming was finished, she just wanted to go right back to the beginning and do the whole thing all over again with her newfound pals.

As a result of Mamma Mia!, she will forever be associated with the Abba hit Take a Chance on Me, which she performs atop a table as she inelegantly – and with all the subtlety of a snake wrapping itself round its victim – seduces an understandably worried-looking Stellan Skarsgard. Walters roars with laughter when I tell her about her number being singled out – and performed – by a quartet of rather well-oiled women of a certain age on a late train between Edinburgh and Glasgow during the Edinburgh Festival.

And as for the extra crowd-pleasers at the end of the titles that practically had them conga-ing out of the cinemas, she explains: "Those songs weren't there to begin with but everyone agreed that when you see a musical, you want that sort of finale. So then we all had to learn Waterloo." Faking chagrin, she adds: "It was a case of 'Not another one!'

"They're actually very complicated songs. I'll never forget we all came in to do Dancing Queen in the recording studio. We were in the booths, the three of us – Meryl, Christine and I – and we all kept singing a bit wrong, even though we'd been listening to the tapes, and Christine said (Walters adopts an American drawl]: 'Thirty years o' singin' it wrong.' And that's exactly what it was."

By way of total contrast, Walters's next acting job – she was going off to start filming a few days after this interview – is A Short Stay in Switzerland, a BBC drama based on the high-profile story a few years back about Anne Turner, a British doctor who was dying of a degenerative disease and arranged for an assisted suicide abroad. Walters lowers her voice and leans forward. "I can't read the end of it just now. I won't read the end of it – when she's there with her children saying goodbye – until I do it." But doesn't the thought of how harrowing it's likely to be just linger like a black cloud until she's got that scene out of the way? Doesn't she ever pass on roles because they are going to be so draining?

" I have passed on things I've been offered because I've thought, 'I can do without that'. I know how I'll react to things, how hard it can be. I did a four-parter for BBC2 a few years back called Murderer, about a woman whose son is murdered. It was about her emotional journey of getting through it and it was like being in mourning for 16 weeks. I thought, 'I'll never, ever, ever do anything like that again!' It made me feel ill, really. So I am careful about what I do because you have to go there in order to play it. What's good about this woman is that she is very bright and very practical and she kind of takes the drama out of things. And I really admire that – especially as I'm someone who likes to put the drama into things, generally speaking!"

At least when she completes A Short Stay, she won't be under pressure to get on with her writing. "Actually," she chuckles, "that's the thing about having my autobiography published that most pleases me – the fact that now, for the first time in about 15 years, I haven't got a book hanging over my head. I could never rest when I finished a job because I'd think, 'Oh God, I've got to do this book...' But now I can relax."

That's Another Story is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced 18.99.

Julie Walters will be "in conversation" at The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, on Wednesday, 8 October, 5:45pm. Tickets 6, available from Waterstone's Edinburgh (0131-226 2666) and from the Lyceum box office (0131-248 4848).