Honestly! Julie Walters Is A Genuine Article

"Yes, well, I think that's what the public warm to," Walters counters. "But I think what they like, though -- they do like things like Evie, where she is funny but there's a sort of vulnerability and tragedy in there somewhere as well."

Still, it appears that her greatest artistic opportunities have come onstage, although Walters won't go that far. She will acknowledge a few scrapes with typecasting.

"I remember the first time I was offered 'Macbeth,' " she says. "I'd done a lot of comedy. And so I remember someone ringing up from the Times -- a nice journalist, actually -- but her ringing up and saying, 'What accent are you going to do with it?' How are you going to play Lady Macbeth and not make it funny ? And I was really scared. And I remember the director saying, 'You just have to gradually do the serious stuff, and people will accept you.' "

She smiles. "There's a part of me that wants to say, 'I'm not just hahaha . I'm somebody who is sad sometimes, who has tragedy, like all of us. So there's a desire to even things up a bit.' "

Through much of her life, there's been a lot of outward hahaha to Julie Walters. Her career breakthrough came in 1980, when "Rita" opened in London. She was much lionized by both critics and the public, and over the next years she became a serious party girl.

"I used to be a bit wild ," she allows. "I think I had my teens in my thirties, really. My parents were quite -- my mother was quite strict, particularly. But that was the time I became famous in England, and when I look back, I think that's what it was -- it was an easy way of dealing with it all: 'Oh, let's go have lots to drink.' " (When she abandoned her nurse's training and took to the stage, her mother had predicted she'd end up in the gutter.)

The partying went on for a while even after she hooked up with her future husband, Grant Roffey. (The two met at a "frightfully frosty" upper-class bar when she cried out in a loud voice, "I bet nobody here is a member of the Labor Party" and he answered, "I am, actually." They've been together ever since.) But once their daughter, Maisie, now 18, arrived, she says, she lost interest in the high life.

Maisie was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 2 and spent years receiving intensive treatment before her doctors declared she was cured. The actress remembers well the long stretches of grief and terror when her little girl was struggling to stay alive. And she makes it clear that she knows how lucky they all were in the end.

Home for the three is a 250-acre farm in Sussex, run by Roffey. It's all-organic, specializing in meats, poultry and eggs. "It's very hard work," she says. "He makes his own sausages and things like that. And people really want the organic stuff. So he can't make enough, you know."

The farm even has its own Web site ( http://www.leehousefarm.co.uk/ ), which makes no mention of show business but lists a slate of hefty prices.

She and Roffey have come a long way from their frolicsome beginnings. "In some ways it's a relief to be 56," she says. "You're not in a kind of race anymore. You're in another sort of -- much more 'jog,' really. I'm quite glad I'm not -- that's why I haven't done a face-lift or anything like that -- although I do dye my hair. That's the limit I think I'll go to.

"I like being older. I'm not out there looking" -- she takes a mock-passionate breath -- " 'Find me attractive!' I'm not looking for that, and I even think that if, God forbid, I hadn't got my husband I wouldn't be doing that."