Quotes By Julie Walters

I was asked about doing a nude shoot for men's magazine GQ. I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard.

I'm more selective now I've got a family. I don't want to work all the time. My daughter's 12; I don't want to miss out on her life. Soon she'll be a teenager; she won't want me around.

There is this idea that appealing to youth is the only way forward. But that is no longer the case. Youth is not everything. Now we have all the baby-boomers in their 60s, like me, who are actively engaged in life - we're not retiring, we're not just being put out to grass once we hit 60.

Suddenly, you are very much in the present, and you learn it's really the place where you should always live.

I don't want to give up acting - it's what I am.

I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.

I can understand why people get annoyed at being remembered for one thing, but a lot of actors aren't remembered for anything. I don't mind that.

I was the little, funny one. I felt I was the child among grown women.

Sixty felt like a big landmark. Not in a dreadful sense, but none of the other birthdays have bothered me. It's got labels on it - OAP, retirement - and I just wanted to take stock. I wanted to be in my greenhouse at home and at least give myself the opportunity of not working again.

It's very strong after the birth. It's extraordinary. You can't watch anything to do with kids being harmed.

I don't know if you can change things, but it's a drop in the ocean.

I keep seeing myself in my daughter, and I see my mother in me and in her. Bloody hell.

I don't like being out of the crowd. It's lonely within a group.

Being a mother adds another emotional dimension, a feel for children that I didn't have before I had one. They were a pain before.

It's getting better generally, daily, especially in TV, for women in acting; and age and looks count less. As more women come into the business. Change of any sort takes a long time to happen.

I'd like to think there'll be too much of real life going on for me to want to do much acting.

Some people have a terrible stretch between family and work. It is a difficult thing to achieve.

It seems that when you get to a certain age you almost give yourself permission to misbehave and say what you think. People allow it, with very old people.

I'm massively talented, and very, very beautiful in person; the public don't really realise that.

In order to be creative you have to be allowed to fail.

I'm too young at 50. I'm not grown up yet. There's part of everybody like that.

That's why I'm an actress - escaping into a world.

I always loved my mother, felt loved, but she was judgmental. Her father in Ireland didn't approve of women generally, and she took on his values. She believed her own mother was foolish.

My mother was born on a tiny farm in County Mayo. She was meant to stay at home and look after the farm while her brother and sister got an education. However, she came to England on a visit and never went back.

The characters do have a life of their own; it's weird.

I was always someone who lived in the future all the time, it was always the next thing - dreams of escape.

I'd love to be in another film, but they haven't asked me. I think it's a shame but the prospects of me doing another one now are remote. Please do campaign on my behalf.

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

I'll tell you how it happened. The phone rang. Paul, my agent, goes, 'Would you like to play Meryl Streep's?' I said, 'Yeeees! I'll do it, whatever it is.' He said, 'It's Mamma Mia!.' I said, 'Oh no, which character? The fat friend?

Oh all the time when Victoria Wood and I did our series. There were people asking 'Can women be funny?' People still ask that. It's like asking: 'Can women breathe in and out?'