Even more surprising is to discover that our Julie, once the original Labour luvvie, now declares her love for Labour lost. The final betrayal being, she reveals, its “dissembling” over Iraq and its “irrelevant” row with the Beeb.
“It has really been since Iraq,” she says of her disengagement with the party for which she was once the leading pin-up.
“It is insulting to people’s intelligence, these nonsense justifications for going to war,” she says. “Tony Blair should explain what the hell has gone on. The BBC is irrelevant, the government has got to stop dissembling.”
Her attack will find sympathy among Labour members who have long considered her the acceptable face of celebrity endorsement. While Blair filled No 10 with fair-weather friends such as the Gallagher brothers, Walters was a committed socialist. She starred in an election video in the early days of Neil Kinnock’s leadership and, more importantly, many of her roles have carried a social message.
Boys from the Blackstuff, one of many Alan Bleasdale collaborations in which she starred, was the best propaganda Labour had in the 1980s, highlighting the effects of unemployment under Thatcherism.
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“I am not bothered about ‘image’, but I couldn’t take a part where I felt uncomfortable with the message,” she says.
This is not just luvvie spin. Walters is arguably the nation’s best-loved actress, thanks to her cockle-warming, working-class girl made good in Educating Rita, and her big-hearted role in Billy Elliot. She was displaying the capacity for self-improvement, for the future to be better than the past, while Blair was still mastering his legal briefs.
But the nation should brace itself: Walters is about to star in the rather Tory role of one of the Yorkshire Women’s Institute ladies who stripped for charity in Calendar Girls.
The film is being hailed as this year’s Full Monty (after all, it’s heart-warming, northern and yes, all British). And that isn’t the end of Walters’s new incarnation as an ageing sex symbol, she’s also playing the Wife of Bath in a BBC adaptation of The Canterbury Tales.
She seems rather surprised by her new siren status. Promoting Calendar Girls in Cannes, Walters was confronted by a giant billboard of herself, stark bosom naked. It is the first time she has been so exposed for a quarter of a century. To her bemusement, the critics swooned.
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Walters is still as refreshingly down to earth as she always seemed in her films. When I tell her she has become a British institution she quips: “That makes me sound like I’m open for coach parties.”
Actresses can be as riveting as endless Tannoy announcements on Barking station. But Walters is not from central casting: few actresses would rush into the bar exclaiming: “I’ve been looking for somewhere to pee since Croydon.” Or dare shout to the terrified, resolutely unmarried Alan Bennett before a sex scene: “Hold on Alan, I’ll just put my cap in.”
The novelist Milan Kundera once wrote that laughter kills passion, but Walters disagrees. “The only way to deal with it is to treat it as a joke.” And Calendar Girls is full of Walters-esque gags: as the WI strippers become unlikely celebrities, one hubby remarks over the marmalade: “See you are naked in the Telegraph, dear.”
Of the bawdy Wife of Bath, Walters chortles: “She loves shagging.” But isn’t it unnerving to be filming sex scenes at 53? Walters says she drank large amounts of champagne on the set to quell her nerves before complaining, inaccurately, that her breasts were sagging so badly she looked “like I’m smuggling coconuts into the country. Oooh, all that cellulite”.
“God I hope the tabloids don’t catch me with that,” she says. “No thank you. I’ve seen Cilla (Black) in the papers. Not a pretty sight. Luckily, I was wearing big bloomers so I just said (to her co-star), ‘Don’t be embarrassed, you will never penetrate that in a million years.’ There is one bit where you see quite a bit of leg: people will switch off in droves.”
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Not least, she fears, Maisie, her teenage daughter, who, if she watches the episode, will see rather more of her mother than a bit of leg.
“I never thought I’d be doing anything quite like this. Not at my great age. But then I thought, it’s going to give me a bit of a bloody boost instead of only playing old grannies.”
More seriously, Walters is interested in what she terms “this modern idea that you have to look young, no matter how old you are”.
Usually, she says, older ladies are meant to look sexy but not to act it. “I liked exploring the sexuality of a woman in her fifties. I am not a very sexually confident woman. But acting for me is finding things in the character that are like yourself, so you summon that tiny part of you that is similar.”
Walters has rejected the obsessiveness that many women of her age have with their looks. She looks all the better for not being overly manicured.
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She lives on a 90-acre Sussex farm with her husband Grant Roffey. She met him when she shouted drunkenly across a “Hooray Henry” bar in Fulham: “I bet nobody here votes Labour.” The future Mr Walters was the only person among the brayers in striped shirts and Gucci loafers who said: “I do, actually.” They have been together ever since.
She says that Roffey saved her from a period of drink-fuelled loneliness and revels in playing the farmer’s wife. When their sow died, Walters reared the orphaned piglets. “A local farmer said, ‘Just let them go’, but they were so divine I felt like producing my own milk. Even the runt survived.” So how did she feel when the little piggies went to market? “Don’t even mention it.”
Life on the farm sounds idyllic, but it has not been without its problems. In 1990 Maisie was found to have leukaemia. Walters stopped working for four years and on top of fearing for her daughter’s life she was forced to question her own mothering when Maisie looked to her father for comfort.
Walters says it was particularly hard because she had always resolved to not be like her mother — an austere Irish Catholic. Today Walters wonders whether she isn’t rather similar to her mother.
I express surprise; she seems so warm. “I can come down very hard on my daughter and I have apologised and said, ‘I’m sorry, that was my mother coming out’.”
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Walters was brought up with the strict instruction “not to get above yourself” and sent to a convent. “It was abuse; we were really, really hit.” Later she became a nurse. Her mother was horrified when she left her job and native Birmingham for a theatrical troupe in Liverpool. “Mother was driven and wanted all of us to achieve, achieve, achieve. I’ve still got that, even on a domestic level.”
Michael Caine, who educated Rita, has said Walters “had a lot of anger and wasn’t about to forgive the world”. Does she agree? “Maybe I did years ago. I was insecure, didn’t know if I was good enough. There was class . . .”
Does Rita still resonate? “Well, it’s about a working-class woman making her way. Lots of women wrote saying they had done a university course and dumped their husbands after seeing it. It made them think there was a bigger horizon.”
Walters’s career is the opposite of Hollywood escapism. “I’ve got a bit of a detector for characters who aren’t real,” she says. Most actresses deny that they resemble their theatrical roles, but Walters just says: “Your experience is all you’ve got to work with.”
She is enjoying playing Mrs Weasley in the Harry Potter films and rushed out to buy the new book to check her character was still there. What did she make of the attack by A S Byatt, who felt it was unhealthy that so many adults read Potter? “I don’t agree. It’s got people reading. And it’s got a wit adults can enjoy. Not everyone can cope with Possession (Byatt’s meisterwork). My husband bought me it. Well, I’m afraid I’m too thick to get through it.” Pause. “Or it was too thick.” Miaow.
And so we turn to her literary endeavours. “Oh, don’t talk about it,” she winces. “I started writing (the novel) seven years ago. I’ve left one of my characters in bed for two years. She must be getting bedsores by now.”
Her book should be quite a romp — if it ever appears. “Well, I’ve only got 10,000 words left; I’m nearly there. I turn on my computer and there are my characters, my bunnies, my babies.”
The novel is about three actresses. They go to New York where one goes missing. The setting afforded Walters an excuse for frequent missions to Manhattan, and a visit to a Brooklyn police station where a prisoner was handcuffed to a radiator. She recalls this with a strong sense of injustice.
It is indicative that one so full of social concern should reject the Labour party. In a plastic profession, Walters is authentic — which is why she’s given up on phoney Tony and will go on being our leading lady.