Academy-Award nominated actress Julie Walters think she is a dying breed. Her recent comments that there are too many 'posh actors' today and very few working class ones like her coming through the ranks, caused a wee rumpus in the media, She certainly does have a point as over in the UK every new star seems to be ex Public School (that's the same as a posh US Private School) : think Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch just to name few. It has not however affected the demand for her work and Walters is back on UK TV screens next month for the second series of Indian Summers, Channel 4’s epic of intrigue and romance, set in the hill station of Shimla in the dying days of the British Raj.
Today on her 66th Birthday we look back at just a few of the highlights of her very successful career that have made her so immensely popular and a treasured gay icon.
Her breakthrough role came in 1983 when she transferred her performance in Willy Russell's hit play to the big screen in Educating Rita and won her a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and her first Academy Award Nomination.
Walters rejected all the numerous offers that Hollywood showered upon her after Educating Rita and went back to the UK to star in Terry Jones movie Personal Services based on the true life story of the much-beloved Cynthia Payne the British brothel keeper and Madam who showed how hypocritical the UK sex laws were at the time. The movie, a smash hit in the UK, flopped ignominiously in the US .... one audience member walked out muttering that 'the movie contained something to offend everyone.'
That same year she played the mother of murdered gay playwright Joe Orton's in Stephen Frear's biopic of Orton called Prick Up Your Ears cementing a love affair between Walters and the gay community that has never diminished since.
Walters won her second Academy Award Nomination for teaching Billy Elliot to dance in the popular 2000 movie.
It was however Walters work with the TV comic actress/writer Victoria Wood that she won over everyone's hearts in the UK ..... and it is an enormous shame that none of the enormous body of work that kept us Brits hysterically scream in laughter ever found it's way to the worldwide audience that it so deserved. From a vast secretion of favorite clips, queerguru has chosen two. The first from this glorious Made-for-Tv Movie Pat and Margaret about two long-lost sisters who are now world's apart.
However there is a hardly a single Brit gay man of a certain age who doesn't know the words of this classic sketch called Two Soups off by heart which shows Walters at her very funniest.
Meanwhile check out her scene-stealing performance as the Irish landlady Mrs Keogh in the new Oscar nominated movie Brooklyn.
Happy 66th Birthday Julie Walters ..... and thank you for enriching our lives.
