Julie Walters

Walters has been nominated for two Academy Awards across acting categories—once for Best Actress and once for Best Supporting Actress. She was honoured with the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2014. She was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2017 for services to drama.


Walters rose to prominence playing the title role in Educating Rita (1983), a part she originated in the West End production of the stage play upon which the film was based. She has appeared in many other films, including Personal Services (1987), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Buster (1988), Stepping Out (1991), Sister My Sister (1994), Girls' Night (1998), Titanic Town (1998), Billy Elliot (2000), seven out of eight Harry Potter films (2001–2011), Calendar Girls (2003), Becoming Jane (2007), Mamma Mia! (2008) and its 2018 sequel, Brave (2012), Paddington (2014) and its 2017 sequel, Brooklyn (2015), Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017), and Mary Poppins Returns (2018). On stage, she won an Olivier Award for Best Actress for the 2001 revival of All My Sons.


On television, Walters collaborated regularly with Victoria Wood; their projects included Wood and Walters (1981), Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV (1985–1987), Pat and Margaret (1994), and dinnerladies (1998–2000). She has won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress four times, more than any other performer, for her roles in My Beautiful Son (2001), Murder (2002), The Canterbury Tales (2003), and Mo (2010). Walters and Helen Mirren are the only actresses to have won this award three consecutive times, and Walters is tied with Judi Dench for most nominations in the category with seven. She is the only actress to win the International Emmy Award for Best Actress twice, for her roles in A Short Stay in Switzerland (2009) and Mo (2010). In 2006, the British public voted Walters fourth in ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars.

Early life[edit]

Julia Mary Walters was born on 22 February 1950 at St Chad's Hospital^[1] in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England,^[2] the daughter of Mary Bridget (née O'Brien), an Irish Catholic postal clerk from County Mayo, and Thomas Walters, an English builder and decorator. According to the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, her maternal ancestors played an active part in the 19th-century Irish Land War.^[3] Her paternal grandfather Thomas Walters was a veteran of the Second Boer War, and was killed in action in World War I in June 1915 while serving with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment; he is commemorated at the Le Touret Memorial in France.^[4] Walters and her family lived at 69 Bishopton Road in the Bearwood area of Smethwick.^[5][6][7] The youngest of five children and the third to survive birth,^[8] Walters had an early education at St Paul's School for Girls in Edgbaston and later at Holly Lodge Grammar School for Girls in Smethwick. She said in 2014 that it was "heaven when [she] went to an ordinary grammar school", although she was asked to leave at the end of her lower sixth because of her "high jinks".^[9]


Walters later told interviewer Alison Oddey about her early schooling, "I was never going to be academic, so [my mother] suggested that I try teaching or nursing. [...] I'd been asked to leave school, so I thought I'd better do it."^[10] Her first job was in insurance at the age of 15.^[11] At the age of 18, she trained as a student nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham; she worked on the ophthalmic, casualty, and coronary care wards during the 18 months she spent there.^[12] She decided to leave nursing and went on to study acting at the newly established Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre (now Manchester School of Theatre). She worked for the Everyman Theatre Company in Liverpool in the mid-1970s, alongside several other notable performers and writers such as Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Jonathan Pryce, Willy Russell, and Alan Bleasdale.^[13]