Honestly! Julie Walters Is A Genuine Article

By Chip Crews
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 29, 2006

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.

"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."

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.