Unfortunately, by the time I was in the lower-sixth form, I was just bunking off all the time. They actually threw me out of school — I was labelled a subversive — but, rather foolishly, they gave me the letter to take to my parents. “Shite,” I thought, “what am I going to do now?”
I had one get-out clause. During my careers interview, I’d mentioned that my mother wanted me to go into nursing and, somehow, I’d managed to get offered a place at the Queen Elizabeth, one of the best training centres in the country. Instead of telling my mother I’d been thrown out of school, I said I’d decided not to stay on in the sixth form because I’d got this place on the training course. She was cock-a-hoop! She didn’t give a damn about my A-levels because I was going to be a nurse.
As soon as I agreed to do the nursing, I knew it was a mistake. I remember lying in the bath and saying to myself: “I want to be an actress.” Just the fact that I’d said it out loud seemed to make it real. God knows where I’d got this idea from, because I wasn’t one of these children that does acting at school. I was generally quite suspicious of that type of person. I thought they were too precious, too poncy. Looking back, I think acting was an escape route. I wanted to be loved and I wanted recognition. I had a desire to be seen and heard. I wanted a voice. Words and language and people — watching people, watching how they would interact with each other — seemed to give me that voice. When I read books, I really identified with them. They gave me clues about life and about who I was.
Of course, all that’s very hard to understand when you’re a teenager, which is why I ended up doing what my mother wanted instead of listening to what was going on inside my head. It didn’t last long, though. Halfway through my course I just thought: “I can’t do this. It’s not me.” So I applied for a place at Manchester Polytechnic and, well, I got in. I wasn’t interested in being famous or a celebrity. I just wanted to play different characters on stage. That was the only thing that excited me.
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Getting accepted at college was the easy bit. I still had to tell my mother I was giving up nursing. My dad and my brothers literally had to stand between me and her to stop her getting hold of me. She thought it was madness. The only thing that calmed her down was that my course was also a teaching course and, if I became a teacher, I’d get a pension. “Will you listen to that! She’ll be getting a pension.”
Manchester Poly was heaven. It was as if all the right doors had opened, as if I was suddenly in the right gear after straining for 20 years in the wrong gear. I’d spent my whole life being intimidated by every other frigging world I’d come across, but with acting I felt like I’d come home. When people asked me if I wanted to be an actress, I said: “No, I don’t want to be an actress. I am an actress. Whether I pass this course or get work is immaterial. I am an actress.”
Luckily, I did get work. Straight after college I joined the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. It was everything I wanted and more. People like Bill Nighy, Trevor Eve, Tony Sher, Pete Postlethwaite, Alison Steadman — as far as theatre went, it was the best place in the world. This wasn’t poncy theatre. It was real, written by local people. It meant something.
Some of our pub shows were pretty raucous. We were never bottled off, but the vice squad came down there one night. They were easy to spot — short hair and big boots. Somebody had tipped the police off that the play we were doing had a lot of swear words in it. I can’t even remember what it was, but we were told to cut out the bad language.
I did eventually reconcile things with my mother, but it’s difficult to say when that was — probably sometime around Educating Rita and working with Victoria Wood. They both happened about the same time, and suddenly I had a profile. Once I’d got that, she thought I was safe. Mind you, she never told me she was proud of me or anything like that. That wasn’t my mother’s style. The only reason I knew how she felt was because I found a collection of my cuttings after she died — tucked away in a suitcase.
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Julie Walters stars in Driving Lessons, which opens in cinemas on Friday. Her novel, Maggie’s Tree, is published by Orion on October 12