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academy interview
the dark side
Julie Walters has that gift of being able to convey broad comedy in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Take her television commercial for an absurd-sound- ing dishwasher fluid called Glist. After explaining how the product has proper scientific endorse- ment, she finally declares with a deliciously straight-face, “There’s nothing like a good boffin!”
Even on her latest small screen project, in which she plays the mother of a murdered son, Walters still manages to leaven the prevailing gloom with occa- sional and much-needed glimpses of humour.
BAFTA
award- winning actress Julie Walters talks to Quentin Falk about laughter and loss
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The BBC2 four-parter, unam- biguously titled Murder, is beauti- fully written by Abi Morgan with a luminous performance by Walters at its core. “I think,” director Beeban Kidron told a BAFTA audi- ence at a recent preview screen- ing, “Julie may be the finest actress I’ve ever worked with.”
Playing grief-stricken house- wife Angela Maurer in Murder was, Walters admits, probably “about the heaviest thing I’ve done. It was relentless. Although there’s a lot of stuff on TV about crime, this one’s so totally differ- ently dealt with, so unusually writ- ten. I loved my character’s emo- tional journey.”
But it apparently took its toll too: “I slept badly all the way though it and it ran me down. I thought I was managing to switch off but in the end I sup- pose I was so into her [Angela] that it brought me quite low.”
It’s difficult to imagine Walters, 52 and prettier in person, as ever being ‘brought low’ for on screen, at least, she personifies dauntless whether playing a bal- let teacher in Billy Elliot or the inquisitive, mature student in Educating Rita which so spectac- ularly, if perhaps a shade belat-
edly, launched her film career nearly 20 years ago.
“Did I research the role? These things are always down to the individual. I always felt it was there on the page. For me something like this is much more an imaginative thing, imagining the boy was my boy. There’s a huge sense of loss, and you don’t need someone to tell you that. Mind you, I did watch Kilroy a couple of weeks before we started on which they had a dis- cussion among parents of mur- dered children.”
As mother of a 14 year daugh- ter, Walters certainly needed no reminding of just how precious children are.
Murder may have been her darkest role to date but it has continued the thread of children- and-loss which “in one way or
another” seems to have filtered her more recent work.
“There was also All My Sons at the National and then My Beautiful Son for Granada. I was telling my friend the other day, I’m so drained from them and she said, ‘Well, why are you doing these parts?, which quite set me back and made me think about it because it is a bit odd.
“I don’t really know what the answer is except that it is inter- esting to look at grief and loss. We have all gone through it and if we haven’t yet, we are likely to at some point in our lives,” she adds.”
My Beautiful Son, in which Walters played a middle-aged Liverpool mother suddenly re-unit- ed with a long adopted American son (US network come- dy stalwart Paul Reiser), earned