<P> On television, she is well known for her collaborations with the late Victoria Wood, having appeared with her in several television shows including Wood and Walters (1981), Victoria Wood As Seen on TV (1985--1987), Pat and Margaret (1994) and Dinnerladies (1998--2000). She has won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress four times, for My Beautiful Son (2001), Murder (2002), The Canterbury Tales (2003) and as Mo Mowlam in Mo (2010). She starred in A Short Stay in Switzerland in 2009, which won her an International Emmy for Best Actress . In 2006, she came fourth in ITV's poll of the public's 50 Greatest TV stars in Britain . In 2008, she released her autobiography titled That's Another Story . </P> <P> Walters was born in St Chad's Hospital, Edgbaston, Birmingham, which was then the main maternity hospital for Smethwick, then in Staffordshire . Her parents, Mary Bridget (née O'Brien), a Roman Catholic postal clerk born in County Mayo, Ireland, and Thomas Walters, an English builder and decorator, lived at 69 Bishopton Road, near Lightwoods Park, in the Bearwood area of Smethwick . The youngest of five children and the third to survive birth, Walters had an early education at a convent school and later at Holly Lodge Grammar School for Girls on Holly Lane in Smethwick . "It was heaven when I went to an ordinary grammar school", she said in 2014, although she was asked to leave at the end of her lower sixth because of her "high jinks". In an interview with Alison Oddey, Walters said about her early schooling: "I was never going to be academic, so (my mother) suggested that I try teaching or nursing (...) I'd been asked to leave school, so I thought I'd better do it ." </P> <P> Her first job was in insurance at the age of 15 . At 18 she trained as a state registered nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, and worked on the ophthalmic, casualty and coronary care wards during the 18 months she spent there . Walters decided to leave nursing, and studied English and drama at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University). She worked for the Everyman Theatre Company in Liverpool in the mid-1970s, alongside several other notable performers: Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Jonathan Pryce, Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale . </P> <P> Walters first received notice as the occasional partner of comedian Victoria Wood, whom she had briefly met in Manchester . The two first worked together in the 1978 theatre revue In at the Death, followed by the television adaptation of Wood's play Talent . </P>

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