Julie Walters The Great Dame

Dame Julie Walters kept her cancer diagnosis quiet, because she didn’t want to make a fuss. Now, Emma Clifton finds the famously mischievous 70-year-old is wondering if this latest movie will be her last, as she looks back on her most memorable roles and talks about loving the anonymity of life on her organic sheep farm.

- Emma Clifton

To be a member of the audience of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre Company, in the mid-1970s, would be to have had a sneak peek at some of acting’s greats as they cut their dramatic teeth. Bill Nighy, the charming star of films like Love Actually and About Time, starred alongside Pete Postlethwaite, the high-cheekboned star of In The Name of the Father. And then there was Julie Walters, in her early 20s, who had left a career as a nurse to study drama and English at university, after an old boyfriend told her she had some acting potential. She has gone on to become one of England’s most beloved actors, and her career is in its fifth decade, which is impressive when you consider she started it on a whim. In the past two years, Julie has beaten stage three bowel cancer, become a Dame and turned 70, and she has approached all three of these life milestones with the same trademark resolute spirit.It was only once she completed all her treatment for cancer that she publicly revealed what she had been going through, not wanting to cause any fuss at the time. When she missed the premiere for Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again in 2018, her agent told people it was because she slipped and ruptured a hernia – an excuse that was so very unglamorous, there was never any reason to think it might not be true. But in reality, she was staring down one of her biggest battles yet.

It was during the filming of her latest movie The Secret Garden (due for release here this year), that she got the diagnosis. In 2018, she had been suffering some “slight discomfort” and indigestion and had seen her doctor, before returning months later with stomach pain, heartburn and vomiting. After being referred to a gastric surgeon, she was told they had found an abnormality in her intestine.