A little funny, a little sad

JULIE WALTERS had distinct opinions about how her character should look in the new film "Driving Lessons," even if it meant she would have to stop covering up her gray hair with dye. "That was painful," she said, laughing.

In the coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old boy, Walters plays an eccentric, dipsomaniac British actress named "Dame" Evie Walton.

"I thought she would have long hair because short hair is something people coif," the 56-year-old actress explained. "Her hair had to be something she hasn't thought about. There is a mixture of neglect, but she is also someone who can brush up. I felt she had been isolated and lived alone. She would have been known in the neighborhood as someone eccentric."

She even gave Evie a slight osteoporosis hump on her back. "I felt she was bound down anyway by life," said Walters, who was Oscar-nominated for 1983's "Educating Rita" and 1990's "Billy Elliot."

"The script had that feel that it comes from someone's heart, though it's mad and funny," Walters said during a recent visit to Los Angeles. "And I just loved her. She is in chaos."

Writer-director Jeremy Brock envisioned Walters as Evie while he was working on the script for "Driving Lessons," which opens Friday.

"And I got her," he said. "How lucky was I? To get her was a key moment because she embodies that particular talent that a few of her caliber of actress has, which is the ability to be both serious and funny -- to achieve bathos and pathos in that very quick mix. She does it with consummate grace."

Based loosely on Brock's own life, the film stars Rupert Grint -- Ron Weasley in the "Harry Potter" films -- as a teenage sad sack named Ben, who is kept under the thumb of his evangelical mother, Laura (Laura Linney). Not only does she rule her son with a firm hand, Laura also browbeats her soft-spoken vicar husband (Nicholas Farrell). When Laura suggests that Ben get a job, he ends up working for Evie, whose career and personal life are a shambles. She's had rotten luck with husbands, and her only child died when she was young. Evie's last job was working on a TV soap opera.

"She's a child as much as she's a grown-up," Brock observed. "She lies, she cheats and she gets drunk. But at times she can be very dignified."

Walters came across an Evie-esque actress years ago. "She had been an actress, like, 30 years before at the Royal Shakespeare Company," she said, but now was working as an extra on a movie set. That didn't stop her from telling everyone what it was like to be on stage with Laurence Olivier.