The role Julie Walters always regretted not playing: “I’d have loved to have done that”
Sometimes an actor will excel in a certain type of movie, and in the last 20 years, nobody has done ‘hungover on a Sunday afternoon’ films better than Julie Walters.
Seeing her face on the TV in something like any of the Paddington or Harry Potter films means you’re in safe enough hands that you can order Domino’s pizza and go back to sleep for a bit, guaranteed to feel better afterwards.
Now I don’t say that to sell Walters short in any way; after all, we are talking about an Olivier-winning, Golden Globe-winning, four-time Bafta-winning actor here with more than 40 years of experience. It’s just that she has perfected that calming, maternal presence in recent years, usually in films set in either Knightsbridge or wherever it is that Harry Potter lives when he’s not at Hogwarts.
Things were very different when she broke through as an actor with 1983’s Educating Rita opposite Michael Caine, a comedy drama that she’d originally performed in on the stage and that earned three Academy awards, plus a Golden Globe each for Caine and Walters. It proved to be the making of Walters, who found herself hugely in demand for the rest of the decade, both on TV and the big screen.
But one role that she desperately wanted was one that she missed out on to an actor who was also having a surge to fame at the time, thanks to popular British shows like Blackadder. Walters recalled missing out on the movie to Digital Spy, saying, “Yes, there was one of those very early on, and she was brilliant in it, actually, much better than me. Miranda Richardson did Dance With a Stranger, a film about [nightclub hostess and convicted murderer] Ruth Ellis.”
She added, “I’d have loved to have done that, and I went up for it, and I got quite close, but Miranda got it. I watched it, and I had to say, it was a fantastic performance, and I thought, ‘I’d never have got that. I’d never have got what she did’. So there was that. But generally, I’ve been very lucky, things have just come my way. Very lucky.”
Directed by Four Weddings and a Funeral’s Mike Newell, Dance With a Stranger told the story of Ellis becoming the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955 for shooting her boyfriend. Co-starring Richardson and Rupert Everett, it was acclaimed by critics, and Richardson won a major award for her performance.
Walters didn’t have to lick her wounds for long, however, as that same year she appeared in the TV series The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ and the Victoria Wood show. She continued to move from TV to big screen and back again for the rest of her career, again being Oscar-nominated for the musical Billy Elliot in 2001 and winning the Laurence Olivier theatre award the same year for All My Sons.
She appeared in seven out of the eight Harry Potter movies and worked alongside Meryl Streep, with whom she became very close, making the ABBA-inspired Mamma Mia in 2008. She also had a role in the Oscar-nominated historical romance Brooklyn in 2015 and was nominated for a Bafta in the process, making a mighty strong case for a sterling career.
