An Educated Rita Returns : British actress Julie Walters captured an Oscar nomination, then put her career on hold to care for a sick daughter. But she’s back in two new films.

It’s 10 years ago now since Julie Walters first entered the consciousness of American filmgoers in “Educating Rita,” playing a young working-class housewife who wants to improve herself by studying literature. She was hugely endearing in the role, which won her an Oscar nomination, and Walters charmed America in person with her refreshingly down-to-earth and comic honesty.

“I went on the Johnny Carson show, and he invited me back while we were still on air,” says Walters, now 44. “I did a huge tour of the States, I was driven around in limos that were bigger than my flat in London. It was great fun.”

It looked like a terrific film career as a comic actress might be budding, but instead Walters returned to England and stuck to stage work and TV. As a collaborator of comedian, singer-songwriter and playwright Victoria Wood, Walters has become one of British TV’s best-known faces.

That’s one reason she seems to have been out of the public eye, to Americans at least. But there is another: Almost four years ago Walters’ daughter, Maisie, then 2 1/2 years old, was diagnosed as suffering from leukemia. The actress immediately stopped work for six months to care for her daughter, and worked only sporadically for the next two years.

Only now is Walters starting to emerge from the trauma that enveloped her daughter, herself and Maisie’s father, Grant Roffey. Her film “The Summer House” with Jeanne Moreau was well-received when it opened in Stateside theaters last Christmas; this summer she stars in two new movies, both of which open Friday.

The first is “Just Like a Woman,” in which Walters plays a divorced London housewife who takes in a lodger, an American merchant banker called Gerald (Adrian Pasdar). They embark upon an affair, but then it transpires that Gerald is a transvestite.

The other is “The Wedding Gift,” a BBC TV film based on a true story. Walters plays Diana Longden, a middle-aged woman almost immobilized by a mysterious disease that doctors cannot diagnose. She relies on the moral support of her compulsively wisecracking husband, Derick (Jim Broadbent), but, sensing her own mortality, encourages him to fall in love with a blind female novelist.

The two films were actually shot a year apart, but their simultaneous release confirms that Walters is back to work in earnest.

“Maisie’s great,” says Walters with a broad grin. She has arranged this interview at a restaurant and hotel near her home in the Sussex countryside, some 40 miles south of London. It’s typical of her unpretentious manner that she starts the conversation by apologizing for her hair being wet; it’s 10 a.m., and she has only just jumped out of the shower.

She is a dream to interview--friendly, talkative, totally without affectation and fond of digressing with anecdotes for which she lapses into a variety of accents. A trim, bouncy woman with sharp features and an alert, almost bird-like manner, she laughs loud and often.

Walters explains that her daughter has just completed her last appointment for blood tests at the Royal Marsden Hospital, a center for cancer patients.

“She’s 6 years old now, and she’s really well. She couldn’t have more energy. The doctors say the chance of this recurring are about the same as her having a road accident. Leukemia’s a cancer that responds to long-term chemotherapy, and she’s been on it for three years. Every weekend she would be tired and washed out because of it, but Grant and I were still happy, because it was better than her having leukemia.”

There was one setback--Maisie had a relapse when she was 4. “We thought, that’s it, we have to face her death,” Walters says. “It was a terrible time for us all.”

Predictably the British tabloid press played the story to the hilt, and Walters and Roffey became accustomed to reporters and photographers camped out on their lawn. “They’d take pictures of Maisie’s empty swing, they fabricated stories without talking to us, it was incredible,” she says.

Eventually Walters decided to go public about Maisie’s illness and auctioned an exclusive interview for which a London newspaper paid 20,000 ($30,000); the fee went straight to the Royal Marsden’s children’s unit.

Walters was already one of Britain’s best-loved personalities, but when the story about Maisie broke, the outpouring of sympathy was extraordinary: “We got so many letters from people, many of whom had been in the same boat. There was this huge wave of warmth. It was lovely. Around this time I met Princess Diana, and even she said: ‘How is she?’ ”

Walters admits her tribulations may have helped in her portrayal in “The Wedding Gift.” “I’d been through that experience, except I was playing the victim of an illness,” she says. “But I know that feeling of getting through each day, and of that being a victory.

“It certainly puts another dimension on your feelings, but I’m frightened of tapping the Maisie area in my sense memory. I worry that once I unleash it, the feelings would just never stop. It’s plumbing the depths of feelings, and I feel in a way it’s not right to.”

She is enthusiastic about “The Wedding Gift,” which was known in Britain as “Wide Eyed and Legless”--the title of a pop song by British group Amen Corner that Derick and Diana used to sing rowdily. “I think ‘The Wedding Gift’ is a strange title,” says Walters, “but I suppose ‘Wide Eyed and Legless’ (British slang meaning drunk) doesn’t mean much in the States. It would make people think of amputees or something.

“But I’m pleased with that work, doubly so because it was so lovely to do. I was sent the script while I was making ‘Just Like a Woman,’ and I found it so touching and funny it made me cry--which scripts rarely do. On set I thought all of us did our absolute best.”

Walters has less to say about “Just Like a Woman,” which opened in Britain in 1992 to lukewarm reviews and did indifferent business: “I’m glad I did it. I thought it was good to do a middle-of-the-road film about a subject like that, because they’re usually art house,” she pauses slyly for effect. “Of course, not many people saw it anyhow, so it might as well have been art house. I liked my character. Her responses to Gerald were good and honorable and right. But the film didn’t tell me anything more about transvestitism, which is a fascinating subject.”

Despite winning an Oscar nomination for her first major film role, Walters never saw herself as an actress with a movie career based in America.

“When I went to Los Angeles for the Oscars, I was taken around for meetings. And I was offered a Burt Reynolds picture called ‘Stick.’ But I thought, no. I was taken along by Columbia Pictures to CAA and they got me an agent. Everyone was shocked I didn’t want to do it.

“They said, come on, it’s a big American picture, don’t you want to? And I said no, it’s crap. I can’t understand why they’re offering me this part. . . .

“They offered me a couple of other things, but I could sense they didn’t really know what to do with me. I could tell that the things that really interested me, the really good scripts, were going to come from England.

“I could have stayed in L.A. and tried to make something happen. But what was the point? No one was going to say, look, you can play a lead role opposite Jack Nicholson. Why would they? There are enough American actresses to do that.

“I had great fun, but I was visiting, so I was free to say what I liked and go home. But I couldn’t take the glitz and lip gloss and shoulder pads, and the fact that people felt they have to look gorgeous all the time. I’d hate to be an actress in L.A. I couldn’t stand the pressure.”

Walters was born and raised in Smethwick, an unlovely suburb of Birmingham, England. (When she discovers this writer lived within a mile of her around the same time, she becomes genuinely gleeful, and the interview is suspended for serious reminiscing about the area and mutual friends from school.) Her mother was an Irish housewife, her father a builder and decorator.

Neither parent encouraged an acting career, so she entered nursing instead, then took the plunge and enrolled for a drama course at a college in Manchester: “My mother said, acting? No good will come of it, she’ll be in the gutter before she’s 20. Which on occasions turned out to be true.”

She went on to join the company at Liverpool Everyman Theatre, which brought her into contact with playwrights like Willy Russell (“Educating Rita”) and Alan Bleasdale (“GBH,” the British miniseries in which she was seen last year.) Respected actors like Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Sher were also at the Everyman; she sees her period there as a career turning point.

Though comic acting seems to be her forte, she has tackled serious stage roles too: She won rave reviews as Serafina, the ranting Sicilian widow in Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo,” wearing an enormous latex overlay beneath her clothes to fill out her trim figure. This was after a six-month break from work to tend to Maisie, and the strain of returning to such a physically demanding role caused a bout of labyrinthitis, an inflammation of the inner ear that left her dizzy, nauseous, fatigued and unsure of her balance.

Still, the worst seems to be over for Walters and her family. She is filming a comic play by Victoria Wood called “Pat and Margaret.” Walters plays a British actress who becomes a star on an American TV soap and returns to Britain to find skeletons in her family’s closet. Then she will start work on a miniseries by Bleasdale, “Jake’s Progress,” in which she is the mother of a hyperactive child with behavioral disorders.

Things are looking up, then? “Yes,” she says cheerfully. “Everything’s a lot better than it was. When we look back and realize how stressed out we were over Maisie, it’s incredible. We were just exhausted and that became the norm, really. It’s only now we’re through the worst that we realize how bad things were.”