Walters speaks of child abuse scare

Rex Features

Julie Walters has revealed that she came close to being sexually assaulted as a ten-year-old.

The 58-year-old actress told The Mirror that she and three other girls were threatened by a paedophile while they were playing in a garden near their convent school in the West Midlands.

Walters said: "He tried to get us into a derelict house. He touched me. It was nothing horrific, but it could have been. It was the start of a sexual assault. There were three of us, plus a little one, and you'd think there'd have been safety in numbers. But we were so frightened of him we'd have done anything."

Walters added that she kept the ordeal a secret because she feared the reaction from the nuns who taught her at school.

"If the nuns hadn't been so awful we'd have told someone," she said. "I thought it would frighten my parents and didn't dare tell them. I only told my mum about it when I was 35."