Facing up to the naked truth

Though perhaps still best known to American audiences for her role in 1983’s “Educating Rita,” for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe, Julie Walters has had a steady and much-lauded career in her native England and has more recently been seen here in “Billy Elliot” and the “Harry Potter” films. She again returns to the spotlight on these shores with her role in “Calendar Girls.”

Based on the true story of a small-town women’s group who pose naked for a charity calendar, the film features Walters as Annie Clarke, the woman whose quiet resolve in the face of her husband’s passing sparked others to extreme action. Walters recalls how, when the calendar first appeared in England, it caused quite a stir.

“You couldn’t get one!” she says, on the phone from London. “The girls sent me one, though, because they liked my work. I knew even then the story would make a great film, people found it so funny and lively. And being a northern girl myself, I wanted to do it.”

The only catch was that in telling the story of the women who posed for nude photographs, Walters herself would have to be photographed in the nude. “It was not something I was comfortable with, I have to say. I’m 53, so I’m not honed and toned, and I hadn’t done any exercise for a bit. Then I thought, ‘I’m not going to start doing all that because that’s not what it’s about,’ and it’s not what they did either.

“I had to have the pose that she had -- we couldn’t choose our poses. When I heard ‘you’ll be playing the piano,’ I thought, ‘That’s fine, no one’s going to see anything, I’ll just be popping over the top.’ I didn’t realize I would have my back to everybody, they would see me.”

In the end, however, the big moment passed fairly unceremoniously. “I had a tiny scene around having my photo taken, so it was just a regular day of shooting for me. We shot the scene, and then the photographer just came in and shot it with the same lighting and everything. It wasn’t like a proper photo shoot, just a couple of quick shots, ‘right, moving on.’ ”

-- Mark Olsen