Julie Walters - 'Getting Older Is A Relief'

Julie Walters brings a unique streak of candour to everything she does. The star of the upcoming Mamma Mia! sequel talks to Tim Adams about night terrors, her childhood, and why at 68 she refuses to act her age.

You don’t so much interview Julie Walters as have a natter with her. Though she is a dame now, she is suspicious of any sniff of pretension, so she undermines anything that sounds like a formal question with a hoot of laughter. And you feel a bit of a fool for trying to analyse her. She’s played so many mums and wives and house-keepers – from Molly Weasley in Harry Potter and Petunia, Victoria Wood’s unhinged parent in Dinnerladies, to Robbie Coltrane’s other half in National Treasure and Paddington’s wise old housekeeper Mrs Bird – it’s like she’s part of the family. In that sense, it is easy to forget what a liberated, gatecrashing actor Julie Walters was when she first became a film star. To remind myself, before I’d come to meet her, I’d watched her in a YouTube clip receiving her first Bafta for Educating Rita in 1982, with her great mass of permed hair, boozy, and heckling Audrey Hepburn and Michael Caine in her Brummie accent.

There is still a bit of that about her at 68, once she gets talking. We’re sitting in a bare, whitewashed dressing room next to where she’s just had her picture taken in a John Travolta dance pose, and talking about the freedoms and restrictions of getting older. “I tend to think, ‘Oh frig it! Who cares?’” Julie says. “I remember reading in a magazine, ‘You should never wear silver after 50.’ That just makes me want to wear only silver until I am bloody 90, if I live that long.”

More than once, she says, she’s been mistaken for Judi Dench. “I don’t mind being compared to her, even if she is 20 years older than me,” she laughs. “It must be the short hair. Mind you, young people think 60 and 80 are the same thing.”