A Real Class Act (Radio Times, 29 January - 4 February 2005)
How did a girl who was thrown out at school for subversive behaviour end up playing the role of a crusading headteacher? Over to Julie Walters...
I get sent a lot of scripts about education, because of Educating Rita," says Julie Walters, "and most of them are really dull. But this one just leapt off the page. There's a bottle being held in someone's face on page one, and then a kid tells the headmistress to f*** off in the playground on page two. I couldn't put it down. Marie is the sort of character I just want to be more like. She has a degree of self-belief that is really inspiring - and the more mouthy she was, the better I liked it."
Walters didn't meet Marie Stubbs until Ahead of Class was nearly finished. "I had such a strong sense of the character from the script that I didn't want to get confused by the real thing." The role of a strong, determined woman in a challenging environment wasn't exactly alien to Walters, who's played characters fighting against the odds in My Beautiful Son, Billy Elliot, GBH and a host of other films.
"Marie Stubbs is particularly good to play, though, because she has these rousing, inspiring speeches. There's one speech she gives to the kids about the meaing of school - about how it belongs to all of them - which is a gift. A teacher friend of mine was so impressed by it that she used it at her school, and it worked like a charm."
Walters is the first to admit that her own experience of education was more like that of the miscreant schoolchildren depicted in the drama. "I was thrown out of school in the sixth form for being 'a subversive influence', which pleased me greatly at the time. Really I was just a chronic attention-seeker; always, 'See me! Notice me!' Then, after a while, I just stopped turning up. That's what really got me thrown out."
If Walters's secondary education was chaotic, her experience of primary school was downright unplesant. "I went to a private Catholic preparatory school, and I was frightened most of the time. The nuns were such bullies; I hated them. Looking back, I find it hard to believe that anyone could treat a child like that." By the time she got to secondary school she was ready for payback.
"We'd barricade desks in one corner of the room, ignore the teachers, that sort of thing. We must have been pretty ghastly."
By a strange twist of fate, Walters came to be on the other side of the classroom when she was taking a dual course in acting and teaching at Manchester Polytechnic some years later. "I wanted to act, but for some reason you had to learn to teach as well. We had to do six weeks' teaching practice, and I was sent to teach drama at an incredibly rough girls' school in inner Manchester. On my first day I saw a male teacher trying to tell a girl off - and her friend grabbed him, wrestled him to the floor and down a flight of steps, banging his head on the way down. That put me off any ambitions I ever had to be a teacher."
While other family members made careers in education (her brother, nephew and sister-in-law are teachers), Walters stuck with acting, and by 1974 was in starring roles at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. "You might as well choose something you're good at. I was a rotten teacher but a good actress."
That career choice, over the course of 30 years, has proved to be as strong on the big screen as it's been on the small one - an unusual and incredible feat. While filming Personal Services, Buster and Calendar Girls, among many others, she's also given us Acorn Antiques, Murder, The Canterbury Tales and The Return. All of which helped her to be named as the most influential person in TV drama by Radio Times last year. "I was flattered by that, but I don't know what it means. Can I just snap my fingers and get something commissioned? I don't think so. As long as I get as much work as I want, that's enough for me.
"When I was younger I would have been happy to be in a soap. I wrote off to Crossroads telling them that if they gave me a job I'd show them all how to do a real Birmingham accent. Later on, I wanted desperately to be in Coronation Street. It would have suited me because I'm a soap addict. My idea of a perfect night starts with Emmerdale, then Corrie, EastEnders and The Bill. Considering I'm meant to be so influential, I'm a terrible couch potato."