MoviesReviewCan one of Britain's best-loved actors make the switch from silver screen to printed page? Julie Walters talks to Emine Saner about her partying years, motherhood, and the alarmingly intimate experience of writing a novelI hear Julie Walters before I see her, a cackle coming from the bathroom of her hotel suite, a fluster when she realises I've arrived, and then she appears, toothbrush in hand, toothpaste foaming from her mouth. "Ooh, you've caught me," she says, her Birmingham accent soft and broad, her face as warm and homely as a buttered crumpet. This is the Walters I was expecting. The cheerful, funny Walters of Mrs Weasley from the Harry Potter films and Mrs Wilkinson, Billy Elliot's dance teacher. So why is her first novel, Maggie's Tree, so dark?
She says it's the dark side of things that interests her most. The Maggie of the title is lost in New York. She is having a breakdown, and her friend Cissie, in flight from her own crisis, has taken her there to recuperate. They are visiting their friend, Helena, a Broadway star and a self-centred woman whose relationship with her feeble husband is falling apart. Then there's Michael, a man who finds Maggie drunk and disoriented in a bar and looks after her. He is in the grip of a devastating grief - he recently lost his young son to cancer. "It makes sense, him wanting to 'rescue' Maggie somehow because he couldn't rescue his child," says Walters. "He had to have lost something, and I felt he had to have had some kind of trauma in his life. Of course, thank God it didn't happen to me."
Walters leans over and touches the wooden table between us for luck, then, as she leans back in the sofa, she goes back once more, this time tapping it harder. Walters' daughter Maisie, who is now 18, was diagnosed with leukaemia when she was two. "Obviously, when my daughter was ill and in hospital, I knew lots of people who had lost children. I witnessed that."
Did she plan to include the death of a child? "No, it just emerged," she says. "That's what I found weird. I found it terribly upsetting writing those bits. Stuff about how children deal with death. Because they are pragmatic and they talk about it. They worry about their parents; they worry, 'Will they be all right when I go?' It's an extraordinary thing [to lose a child] and un-get-over-able really." This intense fear of losing her daughter evidently stayed with Walters. Did putting a character in that position allow her to play it out, release it somehow? "I think so. It was about expressing it - put it out there rather than keep it in," she says.
One of the most touching parts of the novel is the dead child's scrapbook, which Maggie finds under Michael's mattress: it is full of thoughts about dying and photographs of bald children in hospital beds. "Writing the child's notebook came out of all the things Maisie said. I remember she once said she'd like to come back as a baby. She said, 'Aren't you born again?' And things other children have said and that their parents have said. 'Well, can I have his football strip [when he dies]?' They're chil- dren. They're dealing with it, but they see things differently." She breaks off, looks out of the window, changes the subject. "The fact that [Maggie] is having a breakdown ... I've encountered several people in my life who have had breakdowns, and it's alarming and fascinating at the same time."
"Didn't you find it funny as well?" she asks defensively. Some bits, yes, but not really. There is a rape, or at least I think there is (it's violent but vague - he believes he's being passionate, she ends up with a bloody lip). Afterwards, she gives him a good kicking and smashes him over the head with a chair. So no, it's not exactly hilarious; more than anything, it seems sad.
The book took 10 years to write, on and off (some years Walters would only write a few paragraphs). It's not her first book. When she was pregnant with her daughter, she wrote a book about her experience. "It was just gags, really," she says. "I was so terrified of all the pregnancy books I'd read and I felt like, 'I've done this wrong already and she's not even born.' So I wrote a little diary about it."
It was due to come out in paperback, but when Maisie became ill, publishing a funny book about pregnancy suddenly seemed wrong. Maisie was two and for the next three years, Walters virtually stopped working while she and her husband saw their daughter through chemotherapy. It was her publishers who suggested she write a novel instead. "But I didn't think I could do it. I always wanted to write a book, but I never thought I would be able to. I can't hold a whole book in my head. I'm a slow reader - how would I ever be able to write one?"
Is she worried about how it will be received? "Nobody wants to be criticised, so it's partly that and partly because I don't know where it has come from. I don't know what it is. With acting, it's like I want to reach everybody with it, but I didn't have any of those feelings with the book. It just felt like it was between me and [her editor] Alan Samson. When he first told me that someone else had read it, I was absolutely stunned. It was like someone had videoed us making love. It felt almost as intimate. [Writing] comes from the subconscious and that makes you feel exposed."
She may be one of Britain's most successful actors - she won Bafta awards for best actress four years running - but this does not make her immune to self-doubt. She thinks the doubts are probably a legacy from her mother, an Irish Catholic who worked as a post office clerk, while her father was a builder. "She had impossibly high standards. Nothing could be good enough. I think that's why I got on in acting, that huge drive. My mother and I clashed because we were very alike. She was a very strong character and was constantly worried for us. Partly it comes from being an immigrant - you have to work hard and not let people discover your weaknesses. You have to be the best at everything."
Walters became a nurse before leaving to go to drama school. Her mother, who believed in "proper" jobs, was distraught when Julie opted for acting, and predicted that she would end up in the gutter by the time she was 20. But years later, after her mother's death, Walters found boxes of newspaper clippings that her mother had collected charting her career.
After studying at Manchester Poly, she was absorbed into a group of actors and writers in Liverpool, including Alan Bleasdale, Willy Russell and Victoria Wood. Then came Educating Rita - first the play, then the film that would bring her an Oscar nomination. Offers from Hollywood came, but Walters never wanted to move to LA. "I'm not right for it. It's about glamour, and that's just superficial."
Walters is 56, but says she's not worried about getting older. Maybe it's because she has had most of her career to get used to it: the characters she has played, such as Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques, have often been decades older than she was. "It's a good time after the menopause, once the flushes stop and things settle. I've got more energy and things start fitting into place, emotionally."
Cosmetic surgery is not on the cards. "You get this look with Botox now and you can't move your face." Has she ever been tempted? "I'm not saying I haven't looked at that" - she pulls her cheeks tight - "and thought ... But you can tell if someone's had work done. It's not real. You see these women and it's like a plastic mask. They look odd and lifeless. If someone disapproves of you because you've got wrinkles, I don't want to know them anyway. There are already 30-year-old actresses; having Botox doesn't make you suddenly 30."
Walters says she was "a bit wild" when she became famous: "I was a bit of a drinker. I think I did my teens when I was in my 20s and 30s." She says it never became a problem. "Just partying, really. It was a way of dealing with it, sudden fame, that's what I think the drinking was. Then I met my husband and it was obviously meant to be. And when I had Maisie, that changed everything." She says she would have liked to have had more children - "for Maisie's sake" - but she was 40 when Maisie became ill, and that's "just the way it was".
She met her husband, Grant Roffey, in a bar in Fulham. She was drunk and shouted above the braying of the toffs, "I bet there's nobody in here that votes Labour, is there?" - or so the story goes. Roffey turned around and said, "I do, actually." She took him home and he never left. Roffey was an AA man eight years her junior; she was already successful and wealthy. Did he ever resent her? "No, he's always been completely supportive. And gradually he's built a proper business [an organic farm in Sussex] and made a success of it. We have been able to support each other's dreams."
The novel is her current dream, but I can tell she is nervous about this new departure. Is she happy with it? "I don't know. I'm not sure what it is. I'm happy with it in a sense, I'm happy with individual chapters, but I don't know, it's really weird. But I loved writing it, and I'm glad I did it." She pauses. "That's it really. Now I'm going to lie down for a very long time".
· Maggie's Tree is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, price £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 8360875.
· Julie Walters will be talking about Maggie's Tree at Imperial College, London SW7, at 7pm on October 16. Tickets £7; call 0845 456 9876.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJ6Zobpwfo9pbWink6l8cn%2BOn6CcrJmku2%2ByxJqrrqqVqA%3D%3D