To make people laugh is the most fantastic feeling

Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

Julie Walters on nuns, nude scenes, and playing Mrs Overall.

ANDREW MARR: Ever since she gave up being a nurse to follow her true vocation, the actress Julie Walters seems to have been working non-stop.

Julie Walters

She's delighted audiences in the theatre, on television, and in hugely successful films of course such as Educating Rita and Billy Elliot, which have shown her range as a performer - although she's probably most associated with the comic roles.

She's just published her autobiography in which she traces her talent back to an Irish mother with an overdeveloped sense of drama.

Julie's ability to entertain was first encouraged in the unlikely setting of her convent school, as she explained when I caught up with her at the Times Cheltenham Literary Festival yesterday.

JULIE WALTERS: I never had any connection with the theatre. We never went except for the you know odd pantomime and things like that, so I didn't.

But I used to watch television and think I could do that, I could ...No matter what it was - I could do it. And I had this sort of belief that I could do anything.

That sort of got knocked about a bit as the years went by, but yeah. And so I think it's mainly genetic, but also it was something I felt I could do and I got a lot of ...To get, to make people laugh is a fantastic feeling.

And one of the first things that happened was one of these awful nuns at my primary school said, "You should go on the stage." And that was, that was huge for me.

ANDREW MARR: Yeah, yeah.

JULIE WALTERS: Yeah.

ANDREW MARR: She probably didn't mean it that way. (Walters laughs) She probably didn't mean it literally. But you know do you think it has made you a better actress to have, have been teaching, have been a nurse and done all those sorts of jobs before you actually became a full-time actress?

JULIE WALTERS: Oh definitely. You draw on every ...As an actor you have to draw on your own experience. You haven't ...Although obviously you're playing other people, it has got to come through, filter through your experiences and your understanding somewhere of those experiences.

ANDREW MARR: And you came up the hard way. You did, you did the pubs and the clubs and the small theatres on the way up.

JULIE WALTERS: Well I did the Everyman. I started at the Everyman Theatre, which was an amazing - at that time - an amazing theatre. It still is ...to start.

Willy Russell who wrote Educating Rita and Alan Bleasdale who wrote GBH, Boys from the Blackstuff - they were writing for it at that time and it had an amazing cast of actors there. And so that ...And we did do the pubs.

ANDREW MARR: You literally had to go from pub to pub and hold a pretty plastered audience.

JULIE WALTERS: You did. And the thing about Liverpudlians is they are, they're immensely witty. In fact you couldn't have any airspace because they'd be in with something much funnier than what you were about to say.

ANDREW MARR: And you'd go down to London and start to get some great parts. For all those people who think that an actor's life is uniformly sort of glorious and glamorous, there's a wonderful passage in your book about living in Greek Street in Soho, which is possibly the most sordid piece of descriptive writing of my home that I've ever read.

JULIE WALTERS: Well we did live opposite the Soho Sex Centre. As soon as you opened, looked out of the window, that's what you saw, which was terrible when my mother came to visit, but there was no escaping it.

There it was. And Soho then wasn't like it is now. It was much, much seedier in those days.

ANDREW MARR: In your career, there's been two or three obvious big turning point moments. I guess Educating Rita is the biggest of all. Is that right?

JULIE WALTERS: Yes. And it was combined with meeting Victoria Wood and working with her. The two things were sort of happening at the same time.

Educating Rita, the film, obviously was huge for me because then things became sort of a bit more international than they'd ever been and it was the first film that I did, so it was a big lift for me.

ANDREW MARR: Clearly the Victoria Wood relationship - about as important as any, I would have thought?

JULIE WALTERS: Oh yes.

ANDREW MARR: And that is because she's not only a performer, but she's also a writer who seems to answer something in you.

JULIE WALTERS Oh yes, she does. Yes, absolutely! She just, she has an ability to know what you can do, what you can do best.

And I don't know why she wrote so many old ...the old lady started. She just ...I think she must have written a sketch with a old lady and I played it and she just then wrote brilliant, one after brilliant one for me after that. She's just been immensely generous.

ANDREW MARR: And your favourite of the old ladies?

JULIE WALTERS: Oh Mrs Overall.

ANDREW MARR: It has to be, doesn't it?

JULIE WALTERS: (Mrs Overall voice) It is. Yes, it has to be. She's got everything going for her. I just absolutely love her.

CLIP: ACORN ANTIQUES

ANDREW MARR: You say that one of the reasons that you didn't decide to jump into the whole Hollywood thing was simply that the writing wasn't good enough

JULIE WALTERS: Well, yes, I never had much desire anyway to go and be in Hollywood, whatever that means really.

But after Educating Rita, if there was a time it would have been then. And I was around, I did stay around because I did lots of publicity and I got an agent and everything, but no they didn't know what to do with me.

ANDREW MARR: And with the vast sort of success of Educating Rita, did that put you off your stride a bit - I mean the whole success coming to you so quickly then? That must have been a very strange time?

JULIE WALTERS: Yes, it was a strange time. I went a bit wild, I think. I had my teens then in my 30s. It was wonderful as well. I'm not saying it was

...You know you get a good seat in the restaurants and people upgrade you to first class and that sort of thing. They've stopped doing that, but anyway. You know yes, but it is difficult to hold onto yourself.

ANDREW MARR: Yeah. And you've managed to do good stuff and the stuff you enjoy without ever having to kind of do stuff you didn't work.

There's a wonderful story about everybody getting together for a nude scene and insisting that the - I'm not going to say this in front of them, I have to...

JULIE WALTERS: No.

ANDREW MARR: ...the cameramen and the soundmen had to get their kit off as well.

JULIE WALTERS: That's right. It was a film called She'll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas, which we did up in the Lake ...We were all stuck in the Lake District for weeks on end. And it was about an outward bound course and in it was a shower scene where we had to take our clothes off.

Well none of us wanted to do it really. We were sort of slightly dreading it. It was quite a long scene and we were all chatting you know whilst washing.

And anyway we were all sitting in the bar one night with the sound crew and we said, "Oh we're dreading it" and somebody - people have said it was me, I don't think it was, I'm not sure - but somebody said, "Well why don't we sort of play a trick and say that Equity have passed a motion that we, you know if we take our clothes off then the crew have to?" And we were terrified then of course. Because they believed it, it was much more terrifying than anything else, than taking their clothes off. But eventually it was alright. But they did do it.

ANDREW MARR: Yeah, yeah.

JULIE WALTERS: We got into the shower and the sound crew who had been like yeah, they took everything off and there was the soundman - not a bit intimidated by his boom - (Marr laughs) standing there. And there was Clive Tickner, the cameraman, sitting there with just a pair of headphones on. The director didn't.

ANDREW MARR: And then there's Calendar Girls and the last huge hit of course is Mamma Mia. That must have been an absolute ball to make, was it?

JULIE WALTERS: Oh no...

ANDREW MARR: Or actually was it as much fun to make as it looked like it was?

JULIE WALTERS: Oh I think so. But of course obviously there are times when you think god, I'm never going to get these steps and I was terrified of dancing down the table, which I had to do, which was terribly exposing.

CLIP: MAMMA MIA

ANDREW MARR: All the way through, from the sort of Educating Rita and Wood and Walters and Dinner Ladies and so on, you seem to have ...the perception is that you've had one great part after another and they're just piled up. I'm wondering are there things that you're still very, very keen to do next? I mean do you have a sort of list of ambitions to tick off, or do you wait for the next script?

JULIE WALTERS: Yes, I'm really boring. I wait for the next script. I never have any plans or ...I mean I like doing a mixture of things. I'd never say I'm going to concentrate now on film or anything like that. But I don't ...Yeah, it's just been, it's what comes in.

ANDREW MARR: And I guess Mrs Weasley from the Harry Potter films introduces you to a whole new cadre of people, new audience?

JULIE WALTERS: I know! That's right - children, yes which I didn't have really before. But it's usually their parents who say "That's...

ANDREW MARR: They don't spot you in the supermarket, no?

JULIE WALTERS: Never. It's always their mummy. "Go over and say hello. It's Weasley", you know and push them over. And they say "No it's not" usually because I don't look ...I haven't got the huge bosoms or the wig or any of that sort of thing, so they don't recognise me.

ANDREW MARR: That's right.

JULIE WALTERS: It's sad.

ANDREW MARR: Which if I may be so personal, the bosoms I think were filled with bird seed.

JULIE WALTERS: They were filled with bird seed, which was very worrying in King's Cross Station, as you can imagine, with pigeons and owls you see at very close range! (Marr laughs) Yes.

ANDREW MARR: Well you've survived the bird seed. Thank you very, very much indeed for joining us.

JULIE WALTERS: Thank you.

ANDREW MARR: I don't know if anyone's seen. We've had you film you in front of an extremely louche scene...

JULIE WALTERS: Yes!

ANDREW MARR: ...here at Cheltenham, lots of people taking their clothes off, but we've hidden the worst of it.

JULIE WALTERS: We've hidden the buttocks basically.

ANDREW MARR: We've hidden the buttocks. Just, just like Calendar Girls.

JULIE WALTERS: (laughs) Yes, exactly.

ANDREW MARR: Julie Walters, thank you very much.

JULIE WALTERS: Thank you.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

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