Page 11 - 15_Bafta ACADEMY_Louis Theroux_ok

her this year’s BAFTA television award for Best Actress.
It also completed a remark- able, perhaps unprecedented, hat-trick which saw her scoop the three top British performing prizes in a little over a year, following her earlier BAFTA for Billy Elliot and the Olivier Award for All My Sons.
On paper, My Beautiful Son, shamelessly aimed at American TV, might have seemed irre- deemably treacly especially with its disease-of-week subplot about son desperately seeking a live- saving transplant.
In reality, it worked surprisingly well and often very touchingly although, as Walters admits, “if someone had said five years ago these are all the parts you’re going to play, I’d have never chosen this one to win a BAFTA award.”
Her two previous TV nomina- tions – she’s also been nominat- ed five times and won twice (Billy Elliot, Educating Rita) for film – rather neatly define her great range, from the grit of The Boys From The Blackstuff in Thatcher’s eighties to the turn- of-the millennium comic brio of Dinnerladies, yet another collab- oration with her long-time pal Victoria Wood.
And, no, you’re not, sadly, going to see her reprising that
much beloved human wreck Mrs Overall of Acorn Antiques fame. “It belongs where it belongs. Actually, people don’t ask me to ‘do’ her when I meet them because they tend to ‘do’ her themselves,” smiles Walters.
If she has a preference for a medium, it’s probably the stage: “It’s certainly the most exciting. In a sense there’s no comparison with film for in theatre you’re telling the whole story while in film you’re just doing little bits here and there.
“Doing All My Sons at the National was incredible. The audi- ence were almost breathing with you and people were crying like I’d never heard before. Grant [Roffey, her husband] said he was sitting at one of the previews and couldn’t hear because they were all crying in his row. And they used to go mad at the end; almost every other night there was a standing ovation.”
Even if there’s not quite the same immediacy, she also “loves films – because it’s much easier than stage.” Walters is currently finishing off her second Harry Potter (she’s contracted for four) playing Ron Weasley’s mother, Molly, and on general release is Before You Go, an adaptation of Shelagh Stephenson’s stage hit, The
Memory of Water, about sisters re- uniting for their mother’s funeral. Later this year, she is teaming
up with Helen Mirren for Calendar Girls, the cheery true story of twelve Yorkshire Women’s Institute members who posed naked to raise money for charity.
The nudity clearly won’t pose any problem, certainly if this scabrous memory of Murder is any guide.
Laughing, Walters recalls, in her typically bubbly Brummie: “I loved the shagging in the alley. That was great, really good fun. But I had this cold sore. I bet Ron Cook [her co-star] has probably got that virus now! He was so sweet about it as well. And I had to fart.”
Photos from left: Julie Walters with this year’s TV Actress BAFTA; in Murder; in My Beautiful Son; with Jamie Bell in Billy Elliot;
Julie Walters in Murder
9