Happy Birthday: Julie Walters

Julie Walters

Born: February 22, 1950 in Smethwick, West Midlands, England, UK

[on Mamma Mia! (2008)] I thought my acting was terrible in the film; so bad! I sprained my ankle during Dancing Queen and Meryl Streep went mad. She was calling for ice, calling for the nurse, she really looked after me. I was massively intimidated before I met her, because I hold her in such high esteem, but she’s very down-to-earth, a good woman.

Art should reflect society but that’s not going to happen if there’s no funding for working class kids – like I was – to follow their passion. In acting, I certainly think we could end up with too many posh people, the only people who can afford to go to drama school, and that all the working class roles will be taken by posh people pretending to be working class, like it used to be before the Sixties. Not that there will be many new working class roles because there won’t be any working class writers and the society we’ll live in won’t be represented. If I was starting out today, I would never have been able to afford to go to drama school.
Saoirse Ronan, she is amazing. She makes me feel like I should go to drama school, really.

[on Pete Postlethwaite] He was such an important part of my youth. I think you learn from one another without realising it – we certainly sparked off one another acting-wise in the early days. He played Coriolanus at the Everyman and I played his wife. His performance was amazing, terrifyingly on the edge, I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. We hadn’t kept in touch in later years, but my heart really goes out to his family. He was such a massive presence wherever he went, that for them to have lost him.

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