Oscar Profile #280: Julie Walters

Born the youngest of five children to an English builder and an Irish postal clerk on February 22, 1950 in Birmingham, England, Julia (Julie) Mary Walters began her career as a comedienne. Often paired with fellow comedienne Victoria Wood, they were known collectively as Wood and Walters. Striking out on her own, she made her London stage debut in the starring role of 1980’s Educating Rita. Although the studio wanted Dolly Parton for her part in the film version, she was eventually cast opposite Michael Caine with the two of them earning Oscar nominations for their performances. Walters also won the first of her five BAFTA awards to date for her debut performance.

Walters spent much of the 1980s on British TV, but kept her film career alive in such films as Dreamchild (voice only as Dormouse), Personal Services (in the lead role of a brothel madam) and Prick Up Your Ears as the mother of Joe Orton (Gary Oldman). She ended the decade in the poorly received, albeit high profile remake of The Threepenny Opera retitled Mack the Knife, as Mrs. Peachum. Her best received films of the 1990s were Stepping Out with Liza Minnelli and Shelley Winters and The Summer House with Jeanne Moreau and Joan Plowright.

It was her role as the ballet teacher in 2000’s Billy Elliot that set the stage for Walters’ still blossoming career as a major character actress. The role earned her Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Oscar nominations as well as her second BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress. She would subsequently win BAFTA TV awards for 2001’s My Beautiful Son and 2002’s Murder. She later won the BAFTA Fellowship Award for her TV work in 2014.

In 2001, Walters was cast in her most famous role to date as Molly Weasley, mother of Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) in seven of the eight films in the popular Harry Potter series which would keep her employed for more than a decade. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the only film in the series in which she does not appear. She was busy with other projects during the decade when not appearing in the Potter series. She and Grint co-starred in the very un-Potter Drving Lessons. She played Mrs. Austen, the mother of Anne Hathaway’s blossoming nineteenth century author in Becoming Jane. She got to sing with Meryl Streep and the rest of the cast in Mamma Mia!.

Much on British TV during the current decade, she played a rare villainous role in 2015’s Indian Summers. She had her most prominent role on the big screen since 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 2 as the boarding house proprietress in Brooklyn for which received yet another BAFTA nomination for her performance. Rumor has it that the BBC is developing a TV series based on Walters’ character and the boarding house she runs.

When not acting, Walters and her husband, a retired Automobile Association patrolman, run an organic farm in West Sussex.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

EDUCATING RITA (1983), directed by Lewis Gilbert

Walters made a sensational London theatrical bow in the stage version of Willy Russell’s hit play as the blowsy hairdresser who wants to better herself by enrolling in a university course in literature. Although the studio wanted Dolly Parton for the film version, cooler heads prevailed and Walters was cast opposite Michael Caine as the alcoholic professor who helps her. Walters thought she was awful in the film and that director Gilbert was joking when he said she’s get an Oscar nomination for the role. He wasn’t and she did. She also won the first of five BAFTA awards for her performance.

BILLY ELLIOT (2000), directed by Stephen Daldry

Walters had a field day playing the chain-smoking ballet teacher who sees something in 11-year-old Billy that no one else does, and encourages in the dance lessons he’s taking while his coal miner father thinks he’s taking boxing lessons on the other side of the gymnasium. Walters has said that she found the film moving on all sorts of levels. She loved the character that she found so different from most of what she was offered, finding her grim and jaded and not at all maternal but able to instill greatness in the motherless boy by treating him not as a child, but as a man. Another Oscar nod, another BAFTA win were easily hers.

DRIVING LESSONS (2006), directed by Jeremy Brock

Walters had already played Rupert Grint’s mother in several Harry Potter films when the two joined forces in this coming of age story about a shy teenage boy trying to get out from under the thumb of his domineering mother (Laura Linney). A budding poet, the seventeen-year-old takes a job as a housekeeper for a retired actress. Grint as the boy and Walters as the actress are both sensational. Walters was nominated for a Satellite Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, but the film was not as widely seen as it might have been and did not attract further acclaim, which is a pity.

INDIAN SUMMERS (2015), written by Paul Rutman

Set in 1932 in the waning days of British colonial rule in India, this mini-series, which was picked up for a second season by the BBC, plays like the classic 1985 mini-series Jewell in the Crown filtered through the changing times of Downton Abbey. Weaving in and out of a tangled web of passions are the likes of Jemima West, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Olivia Grant, Ash Nair, Nikesh Patel, Roshan Seth and Walters spewing hate and venom as an appallingly deceitful grand dame. It will be interesting to see if she finally gets her comeuppance in the second season.

BROOKLYN (2015), directed by John Crowley

This richly textured film about a mid-20th-Century Irish girl who emigrates to New York City, spends equal time in Ireland and New York, creating a great showcase for Saorise Ronan, but not allowing much screen time for the rest of its wonderful cast. Emory Cohen and Domhnall Gleeson as the men in her life manage to make strong impressions despite limited screen time and so does Walters with even less as the proprietress of the boarding house where the girl lives. Fortunately for Walters lovers, the BBC has allegedly given the go-ahead for a series based on Walters’ BAFTA nominated character and the boarding house.