Honestly! Julie Walters Is A Genuine Article

With her five British Academy Awards, sundry critical salutes and recognition by the Sunday Times of London, no less, as "arguably the nation's best-loved actress," Julie Walters ranks as an authentic personage. Producers fling themselves at her feet; marquees sing her name. Wherever she goes, she matters. And now, the Great Lady is here with an announcement.

"I've been in the toilet all day ," she says.

It's not one of Walters's grander entrances, but like so many of her stage and screen moments, it wins points for authenticity. Whether the line is "Out, damned spot!" or something rather more prosaic, she invests it with all of her considerable powers.

The renegade flu bug that cut into Walters's stay in Washington was probably encountered on one of the planes she's boarded recently as she plugged her latest movie, "Driving Lessons," across the States. Call it the price of doing business -- but there'll be no more talk of illness.

"I'm not going to bore you with the ins and outs of that," she says cheerfully, taking a seat at the far end of the hotel coffee table here at the Ritz-Carlton Georgetown. "I feel better now."

Walters, 56, is well known to American film buffs for such efforts as "Educating Rita" (1983), "Billy Elliot" (2000) -- each of which brought her an Oscar nomination -- and "Calendar Girls" (2003). At home in England, where she also does a lot of stage and television work -- three of her five BAFTAs are for TV -- she's both a critical and a popular favorite across the spectrum, from comedy to drama to tragedy. "Driving Lessons," which opens here Friday, draws on her skills in each of these departments.

The film, written and directed by Jeremy Brock, tells the story of Ben (Rupert Grint), a gawky, repressed teenager who takes a job as an assistant to a pushy, charming and quirky former actress named Evie (Walters). Through their relationship, each is transformed. (Walters and Grint also play Molly and Ron Weasley, mother and son, in the "Harry Potter" films, which she and Brock say is purely coincidental.)

"For me Evie was very real and complex," Walters says. "And she . . . though she's mad and eccentric, it comes out of real pain."

Brock marvels that Walters "makes the ability to slip between genres, comedic and dramatic, look like it's something that just happens, and it isn't. It's a talent, and I wanted that talent." Well, the talent plus something else: "When you have Julie Walters in your movie, then suddenly things are very different in terms of getting money, in terms of doors opening."

In dazzling, exasperating and ultimately saving Ben, Evie bears a certain resemblance to Auntie Mame, a character neither Walters nor Brock is familiar with. But where Mame seems eternal -- you get the feeling she'll be bewitching young men for several more centuries at least -- Evie is mortal as well as human. It's a rather showy part: She drinks, she lies, she hurts, she feels lonely, and her bravado and her merriment are her shield.

Not surprisingly, all that made her "just heaven" to play, Walters says, and a worthy addition to the gallery of characters she's compiled over the last quarter-century. Her résumé has been particularly notable in the theater: the striving Liverpool hairdresser in "Educating Rita," as well as leads in "Fool for Love," "Macbeth," "Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune," "The Rose Tattoo" and "All My Sons," for which she claimed an Olivier Award. Still, it's her comedy roles -- many on television in concert with her friend Victoria Wood -- that resonate most strenuously in Britain.

"Within the British film industry, she has become the default setting for wacky-older-lady performances," the Times noted almost ruefully a few months ago.