Honestly! Julie Walters Is A Genuine Article

Sounds like a segue. What is she looking for?

"Parts that have the humor and the pain," she says. "And that are truthful, and that have a journey of some sort. I don't want to play someone who doesn't really move throughout. They're okay if you're doing them for the money, but you know, otherwise . . . " (Walters says she's never taken a part for the money, although she acknowledges with a wicked-guilty look that she has done a number of commercials.)

This month Walters has assumed an altogether new sort of role: novelist. Her maiden effort, "Maggie's Tree," has just been published, and she'll begin flogging it once she gets back home to England.

It took her years to finish the book, and now that she's done so, she's nervous.

"It's a strange feeling -- it feels very exposing," she says, which seems like an odd thing for an actor to say. "I don't know why."

Acting scares her less, but in that arena she faces far higher expectations.

Six years ago a critic for the Guardian was discussing her career and raved about her 1984 appearance in "Fool for Love," concluding: "I think of this performance every time I see Walters on TV giving one of her comic turns in a show written by one of her friends. And while there is much pleasure to be had from these performances, I always wish we could see more of the other Julie Walters -- that one who can terrify you with her sheer power of feeling, who on stage has no limits."

The quote is read to her. "Whoo -- gosh! Right. What do I think of that?" she says. "I think stage is like that. . . . There's something very freeing about being onstage in something good. And it's the most exciting -- when it's good -- and on a Saturday night with a full house, and those pivotal moments in plays, you can feel the audience. We're all breathing together almost, you know what I mean? It's different every time, and you're telling the story, you're focusing it, which you aren't on film."

Pretty clearly, she knows the difference.