A different class - Julie Walters

Published Thursday 20 January 2005 at 18:55 by Phil Penfold

For her latest television role Julie Walters faced the challenge of portraying no nonsense school saviour Lady Marie Stubbs. But despite her glittering career, the award-winning actress prides herself on being grounded and dependable in real life too

Julie Walters comes bustling into the room in a neat cardigan and dancing shoes. She has come straight from the rehearsals for Acorn Antiques - the Musical, the West End brainchild of her longtime working partner Victoria Wood, and she is, to put it bluntly, knackered.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We’ve been rehearsing across the other side of London and I really need a sit down - I’m exhausted.”

The musical opens on February 9 and she is reprising the role of Mrs Overall from the long-running sketches which were such a staple of Wood’s television series in the eighties. But before then Walters will be seen on our TVs in a very different role, in Ahead of the Class, a one-off ITV1 drama about real-life Scottish trouble-shooter Lady Marie Stubbs.

Walters truly believes it was the greatest challenge of her professional career. “The only other thing that’s been comparable,” she says, “is when I told my mother at the age of 18 that I was giving up a perfectly respectable job in a very boring insurance office to go to college to do drama.”

She remembers to this day her mother’s response. “She said I’d be dead and in the gutter by the time I was 20! And maybe she was right.”

Walters plays the very much alive Stubbs, the dynamic Scottish-born educationalist who was coaxed out of retirement in 2000 to try and turn around the extremely troubled St George’s School in Westminster. It was at the gates of this school that the headmaster Philip Lawrence was stabbed to death. The school went into a spiral of near anarchy, until the arrival of the redoubtable Lady Marie.

“She is an amazing woman,” says Julie. “But I decided that I would deliberately not meet her until we were well into filming.” She did, however, read her best-selling book about her experiences at St George’s, which, to Walters’ mind, “shouldn’t be hidden away in the ‘educational’ section of bookshops - it should be out on the main displays”.

Lady Marie, who was born and raised in Glasgow’s East End, has a warm Scottish accent that immediately gives away her place of birth. “I was offered the services of dialect coaches,” admits Julie, “but I decided against it because on reading the book Marie’s own voice comes across perfectly and I felt that she was talking through me.”

It is the first time Walters has attempted Glaswegian. “I was very wary about it,” she says, “but Marie has seen the film and she’s given it an unequivocal thumbs up.”

They have even become good friends as a result of the film. “When I met her, just as filming was finishing, we sat for hours in my caravan and I asked her all the questions that you could think of - her background, whether after pulling the school around, she ever went back, which she didn’t. I asked if she was frightened at any time by the pupils, who were at first very threatening.”

Walters feels privileged to have met her. “She is undoubtedly one of the finest educationalists from Scotland, ever. The nation should be proud of her. We should all be proud of her - I could never do what she did, not in a million years.”

Although Walters husband Grant and my daughter Maisie did notice Walters taking on similar characteristics - “I was getting bossier by the day. That’s what playing a teacher does for you.”

Her own school career was somewhat less than stellar. “I’m afraid that my own attendance record at the Holly Lodge Grammar School - which sounds very grand but really wasn’t - was appalling,” she says. “Both mum and dad were at work, so they never checked if I went or not. The result was that I was asked to leave, in a letter from Mr Taylor, the geography teacher whom I adored. I was effectively expelled. They said I was being ‘subversive’. I never took the letter home, it went into a bin, and I just said that I’d decided to get a job and earn some money.

“Matter of fact, I never ever told my mother about what had happened until I was 35! She was astonished - and horrified.”

Despite her subversive youth, Walters has grown up to be a very down to earth adult. And in the face of her notable successes, she remains a very practical lady. There are a great many ways that you can celebrate winning a major award, even more of winning two in the same weekend. You could crack open the bubbly or dance the night away. But, after she bagged her Best Supporting Actress Bafta for Billy Elliot - another Walters related project given the musical treatment, although, this time, she is not involved - and then, almost the next day, picked up an Olivier Award for All My Sons at the National, Walters popped her trophies into her handbag, went home to rural Sussex and loaded up the washing machine.

“It keeps you grounded, doing all the normal stuff,” she says. “Often when I’ve got a big scene to do you’ll catch me thinking about what needs doing at home and at our place, washing and ironing comes pretty well up the list.”

“Believe me,” she chuckles, “there’s usually a big pile of it on the floor that no one’s touched.”

• Ahead of the Class is on ITV1 on Sunday, January 30