Julie Walters: ‘Who cares about getting old?’ | Tim Adams
From Mamma Mia to Mo Mowlam, Julie Walters brings a unique streak of candour to everything she does...
From Mamma Mia to Mo Mowlam, Julie Walters brings a unique streak of candour to everything she does. The actor talks to Tim Adams about fame, family and farming
You don’t so much interview Julie Walters as have a natter with her. Though she is a dame now, she is suspicious of any sniff of pretension, so she undermines anything that sounds like a formal question with a hoot of laughter. And you feel a bit of a fool for trying to analyse her. She’s played so many mums and wives and housekeepers – from Petunia, Victoria Wood’s unhinged parent in Dinnerladies, to Molly Weasley in Harry Potter to Robbie Coltrane’s other half in National Treasure – it’s like she’s part of the family. In that sense, it is easy to forget what a liberated, gate-crashing actor Walters was when she first became a film star. To remind myself, before I’d come to meet her, I’d watched her in a YouTube clip receiving her first Bafta for Educating Rita in 1982, with her great mass of permed hair, boozy and heckling Audrey Hepburn and Michael Caine in her brummie accent.
There is still a bit of that about her at 67, once she gets talking. We’re sitting in a bare, whitewashed dressing room next to where she’s just had her picture taken in a John Travolta dance pose, and talking about the freedoms and restrictions of getting older. “I tend to think, ‘Oh frig it! Who cares?’” Walters says. “I remember reading in a magazine, you know, ‘You should never wear silver after 50.’ [She adopts the voice of Mary Whitehouse, or her mother.] That just makes me want to wear only silver until I am bloody 90, if I live that long.”
