Julie Walters on her secret cancer battle: 'I didn't want to upset people'
Julie Walters is shaking her wrist. Her smartwatch is driving her crazy. ‘It keeps bloody beeping at me,’ she whispers in exasperation as the waiters in the smart hotel coffee lounge swish past. ‘It’s telling me to stop my workout. I haven’t done a bloody workout. Who does it think I am?’ ‘Lorraine Kelly?’ I respond, and she hoots with laughter.
She has been in the room for a matter of minutes and already it feels like we have been enveloped into some sort of embryonic Wood and Walters comedy sketch. This was, of course, in the days before the coronavirus, when the world was a happier, safer place – especially in that very moment with Walters at the centre of it. She’s all smiles, soft, spiky white hair and twinkly brown eyes as she wraps her cosy, grey knitted cardie-coat around herself and settles into an oversized armchair.
The watch (a present from her husband, Grant Roffey) beeps again. She peers at the words that have appeared in its dark digital face. ‘Bloody hell,’ she frowns, then looks at me and switches into a theatrically posh voice. ‘Oh, it’s just reminded me that I’m with The Telegraph Magazine. And I’ve been swearing. I don’t want the esteemed Telegraph readers thinking I’m foul-mouthed and common... which I am.’ She pauses. ‘Feel free to slap me if more vulgarity pours forth.’
This is 100 per cent Julie Mary Walters from Smethwick who, even at the age of six, knew she could put a smile on the faces of the fiercest nuns at her strict Catholic primary school. She likes to have a laugh. She wants to immediately put you at your ease and she seems – thanks to an unbelievably broad range of parts, from Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques to the Oscar-nominated Rita in Educating Rita to Mrs Weasley in the Harry Potter films, not to mention Calendar Girls, Billy Elliot, National Treasure and of course Mamma Mia! – as familiar as a beloved relative. Her latest performance, as a fearsome housekeeper in a wonderful new adaptation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett classic The Secret Garden, is yet another tour de force.
She has won seven Baftas, two Emmys, a Laurence Olivier Award and a Golden Globe, yet she lives on a working farm in Sussex with Roffey, and has been known to turn up to award ceremonies with a bit of Sussex mud on her ballgown. She’s never had a facelift or Botox because she doesn’t want to. ‘I think it would be letting myself down,’ she says. ‘And letting other women down. What’s wrong with getting older?’
Her greatest friend and collaborator was the late Victoria Wood; her greatest achievement is her 31-year-old daughter Maisie; and her greatest pleasure is the fact that she fulfilled the unlikely, ‘jumped-up’ dreams of a working-class builder’s daughter who absolutely knew in her bones that she could act. Her Irish mother told her when she jacked in her job as a trainee nurse to go to drama school that she would ‘end up in the gutter’. Instead she has become a national treasure with an OBE, a CBE – and three years ago she was made a Dame.
‘Well I’m 70 now and I’ve been hanging around for ever, so you all have to put up with me,’ she says with a grin. I tell her we are very lucky to have her with us and for a moment neither of us says anything, we just look at each other as the mood shifts slightly.
‘Ah, the cancer,’ she nods. ‘The bowel cancer.’ In an interview on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire Show just over a month ago, Walters made the shocking revelation that she has recently recovered after an operation to remove two tumours from her lower intestine. Bar a handful of people, it was a secret she had kept from everyone.
The smile lingers on her face, but her eyes are still and her voice is without any hint of artifice or inflection. ‘Well, it’s gone… I’m here. It seems unreal now, it seemed unreal at the time, but it was very real. Very real. It’s changed me because it’s changed the way I live my life. I’m the same but different. I’m not rushing about all the time, getting up at 5am and coming home at midnight.
‘I’ve let a lot of noise go and now a year and a half has passed. I’ve gone from thinking of my cancer as a shock and something terrible that happened to me, to thinking in a way it was a gift.’ She stops. ‘Does that seem crazy or does that make sense?’
We need to rewind. We are sitting in this hotel in west London because Walters is promoting her latest movie, a lusciously beautiful adaptation of The Secret Garden, which has been given a rather clever Brontë-esque twist by its director Marc Munden. She plays the harsh, dictatorial housekeeper, Mrs Medlock, alongside the psychotically depressed widower Lord Archibald Craven, played by Colin Firth. Their quiet, secretive lives are transformed by the arrival of Craven’s niece from India, the difficult, strong-willed Mary Lennox, brilliantly portrayed by Dixie Egerickx.
Walters’ performance as the severe, unflinchingly loyal servant is – of course – as masterful and compelling as every role she has ever played. As an actor, her emotional range is extraordinary in that she is as believable as the politician Mo Mowlam (the Labour MP who fought for peace in Ireland while battling cancer) in the highly acclaimed, Bafta-winning biopic Mo, as she is playing the bonkers wizardess Molly Weasley in seven of the eight Harry Potter films. She is extremely proud of The Secret Garden. She loved spending time with her Mamma Mia! co-star Firth. ‘We had such a laugh, he’d sit telling unrepeatable stories about all the people he’s worked with and then say, “But I can’t possibly name names.” And I would sit there begging him to tell me.’
Yet of all the films she has made, The Secret Garden is the hardest one for her to watch. ‘When we started filming two years ago, I had no idea there was anything wrong. I’ve always had a dodgy gut and a year before I’d had a pain, which I thought was gallstones because my mother had hers taken out around the same age. I was checked and told I was fine. But the twinges came back a year later when I was filming The Secret Garden.
‘Grant pushed me into checking it out and the doctor took some X-rays and told me he’d found an abnormality in my intestine. I was sitting nodding and he just said, “I think it’s cancer.” I thought he was joking, but he showed me these two dark lumps. I don’t actually know how I felt because I was so shocked. But he did tell me that he was going to sort it. I walked into the car park where Grant was waiting and when I said the word “cancer” I saw his eyes fill with tears. We just sat there numb. But what I knew, what we knew, was that we would go through it. I think we both knew not to be emotional, just be practical, deal with it, keep going. Get it out.’
She did not – she says now – tell either her daughter or her two older brothers, Tommy and Kevin, until after she had gone through the operation to remove the tumours that were later diagnosed as stage-three bowel cancer. ‘People deal with it in different ways,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of everyone worrying – particularly my daughter. I told her I needed to have my appendix removed because there was a problem. I couldn’t say the word “cancer” to her. She said, “OK, Mum.” I knew she knew it probably didn’t sound right, but she also knew I wasn’t going to talk about it and she didn’t push me.’
I ask her if Maisie was upset after she realised what her mother had been through. She shakes her head. ‘She knows me and she understood why I waited to tell her.’ The family had, after all, been through a cancer battle before when Maisie was diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukaemia when she was two years old, and spent four years receiving treatment before being given the all clear when she was six.
She nods her head. ‘You just get through it. Do what you have to do [in her case it involved an operation to remove the two tumours and 30cm of her colon, followed by a course of chemo, which left her hair intact and, in her words, ‘fine’] and push on. And now I’m good.
‘I’ve made changes. I saw a doctor about what food I should and shouldn’t eat. I was told not to go vegetarian [because she would miss out on certain types of omegas that she needs], but I avoid red meat and I have lots of greens. I try not to eat sugar because it’s cancer’s best friend, but that’s hard. Apart from that I just think I was lucky that I had bowel cancer because it is one that there can be very good results with. I was told that I had had it for four years before I was diagnosed. Four years,’ she shakes her head and smiles.
I ask her if she felt scared, angry or tearful after her diagnosis, and why she wanted to keep it a secret – and she answers honestly. ‘I didn’t want to upset people around me. I wanted to keep it small. Of course it was frightening, but Grant was with me every step. I wanted to wait till I was in the right place and then I had my dramatic moments. If people fussed I’d shout I was fine, if they treated me like I was fine I’d complain I still wasn’t totally better. But really I didn’t want to have to talk about it until I’d processed it myself. I still find it a bit hard to be honest.’
For all her openness, it is clearly important for Walters to keep the most precious things in her life private. She never discusses her daughter – all she will say is that she is ‘wonderful’. She talks about visiting Victoria Wood in hospital just before she passed away from cancer in 2016. ‘We both had cancer then except I had no idea.’ The pair were inextricably linked since first meeting in Manchester. They were working-class girls who didn’t look like other actors, and shared the same sense of absurd, dark humour. Their TV debut was in 1979 with Wood’s play Talent – a poignant comedy about a wannabe actor competing in a nightclub talent show, accompanied, offstage, by her chubby friend – and rarely a week went by without them speaking. She talks about the moment she got the call to tell her Wood had died.
‘I was in a car being driven from a set. I didn’t know the driver so I couldn’t react. I couldn’t cry or scream. I just said very quietly, “Thank you for telling me.” I can’t describe the emotion I felt. But I just stared out of the window and there was a tiny plane in the distance that had made this huge white cross in the sky. I have no idea what it was for, but I felt it was a message from her. A sign to say goodbye. A kiss. Possibly I’m mad for thinking that.’ She pauses. ‘But I still talk to her all the time. I have a photo of her in my house. I say, “Where are you, Vic?” I talk to my mum and dad too. “What shall I do now, Dad?” or, “Mum, what do you think?” I never get answers but I feel they are all still with me and I like that. These are people I loved. Love. They never really leave.’
Right now Walters is coming to terms with leaving behind another of her loves – her career. Another part of the reason The Secret Garden is so hard to watch is because she knows it might be her final film. She was unable to complete filming due to her operation and chemotherapy, and was replaced by a stand-in for some of the last scenes. ‘I did return to the set a month after my operation. I stood in this tight, woollen full-length Victorian-style costume in 90-degree heat, looking terrible and feeling even worse because I just wasn’t up to it. I had no idea why I had said I could carry on. Then I went home and told my agent I didn’t think I could do anything any more. And I’ve been at home ever since.’
That was more than a year ago. She has said she may consider acting projects in the summer, but as each day passes she feels more and more settled in the home she loves with the man she loves. ‘Pottering, putting my feet up and watching telly,’ she says.
She has worked for five decades to have her home in the country with Roffey, whom she met in 1986 when he was an AA patrolman and she was a fiery young actor who had drunk one too many in a bar in west London. He took her home and offered to mend her washing machine. He never left. They married in 1997 and the steady, unshowbizzy Roffey proved to be the perfect man for her.
She won’t confirm that her acting days are over for good, but she can’t imagine ever wanting to do a part so much that she is prepared to leave her life on the farm with him. ‘I’ve been so driven,’ she says. ‘My mother [Mary, a postal worker] was a very tough, tiny Irish woman who always made you feel you hadn’t done quite well enough. I knew I could act. I messed up my audition to do drama [at Manchester Polytechnic] because I had no clue about the plays or the playwrights I’d taken my speeches from, but I knew I’d done a good job with my performance. The guy asked me if I wanted to be an actress and I looked back at him and just said, “I am an actress.” I knew I could do it. I’d been told I should be on the stage since I was at primary school. But I still wanted to keep showing what I could do, I still heard my mother’s voice pushing me on.
‘I thought about stopping at 60, but I didn’t. I carried on getting up, pushing myself, working all the time, and then this cancer came and it stopped me, which is why I now think of it as a gift. I thought I would just carry on, but I couldn’t and I’ve been happy. I’m enjoying all the shows I never had time to watch [she’s currently binge-watching Mad Men] and it’s wonderful watching other people’s good work.’
As a patron of Women’s Aid, she has also lent her support to a local women’s refuge in Sussex called My Sisters’ House. ‘I’m actually very busy,’ she smiles. ‘I might write a book, I might go to all my meetings with the refuge and a few other local charity groups, slam an M&S ready meal in the oven and then sit and put my feet up and enjoy what I have.’
The Secret Garden is released on 14 August
With thanks to Chelsea Physic Garden for the shoot location
