The award-winning actress Julie Walters is in her element playing bossy boardinghouse owner Mrs Kehoe in upcoming period drama Brooklyn.

“She’s exactly like my aunt!” she says. “I had an aunt when I was growing up and this is exactly what she was like!’

The movie, which is released this month, stars Hanna and Atonement star Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, who played Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter movies, and American actor Emory Cohen, who appeared in The Place Beyond The Pines, in the romance about an Irish girl living in New York in the 1950s, who is torn between two men - one Irish and one American.

The book by Colm Tóibín has been adapted for the big screen by Nick Hornby and directed by Boy A's John Crowley.

“I play Mrs Kehoe, who runs a boarding house for young single girls in Brooklyn in New York,” says Julie, who lives with husband Grant Roffey on an organic farm near Plaistow in West Sussex. "It's an amazing story and it's a great character.”

Brooklyn is the story of a young woman, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) who moves from small town Ireland to Brooklyn, New York, where, unlike home, she has the opportunity for work and for a future - and love, in the form of Italian-American Tony (Emory Cohen).

When a family tragedy brings her back to Ireland, she finds herself absorbed into her old community, but now with eligible Jim (Domhnall Gleeson) courting her. As she repeatedly postpones her return to America, Eilis finds herself confronting a terrible dilemma - a heart-breaking choice between two men and two countries.

Julie’s a huge fan of the book and was equally impressed by Nick Hornby’s distillation of the novel into an understated and emotionally rich script to work with.

“When you read a novel and then you see a film, it’s very hard, because nothing can compete with your imagination” says Julie. “But this script was wonderful and it didn’t disappoint me at all, to the point that I thought Nick Hornby had to have Irish somewhere in his lineage.”

“I’d read the novel when it came out and I loved it, so first of all when I heard they were doing the film and they wanted me to play a part in it, I thought ‘oh fantastic.’

“A lot of novels, they just go and you forget them but when they mentioned Mrs Kehoe, it was the character I had really remembered.”

Director John Crowley had Julie and her innate comic sensibility in mind when it came to casting the role of Mrs Kehoe.

“I knew Julie had an Irish mother and I had a suspicion that she would know that woman inside out, and of course she did.

“She knew who she was, right down to what her hair should look like and what she should dress like. Her accent’s impeccable and of course she’s a hysterically funny actress, but here she’s doing it in a very real way. It’s beautifully played.”

Birmingham-born Julie, 65, shot to fame as one half of the comic duo Wood and Walters, with Julie partnering Victoria Wood on the hit TV show that first aired in 1982. It was her role as sassy Rita in the 1983 movie Educating Rita with Michael Caine that won her international fame, and a string of movie roles followed, including Billy Elliot, seven of the eight Harry Potter films, Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia!

She was Oscar-nominated for both Educating Rita and Billy Elliot and won Baftas for both as well as a Best Actress Golden Globe for Educating Rita.

Earlier this year, she starred in the Channel Four drama series Indian Summers as Cynthia Coffin, the proprietor of the British Club, and in an interview revealed her husband “never gets excited about anything I do”.

She added, “I love the fact he brings everything down to earth. He is great for me. I don’t think of myself as a star.”

In another interview, she described her life on the Sussex farm run by her husband. “[Grant] is out of bed by four, but I don’t wake up till five. Then I just lie there and listen to the sounds of the farm. We’re right in the middle of woodland, so we get birds in summer; the wind and the rain in the winter. I love it.

“About six, I get up and go straight into my routine: make the bed, wash my face, put on a T-shirt and smelly old trousers, go downstairs and put a wash on, put the kettle on, empty the dishwasher… God, this makes me sound so boring.”

Her rural life is a far cry from her childhood in Smethwick, Staffordshire, with her father, Thomas, a builder and decorator, and her “tiny, fierce” Irish mother Mary Bridget O’Brien.

“She had that immigrant thing of ‘You’ve got to prove yourself.’ And she had huge drive,” Julie said of mother in The Mirror interview. “My mother was also terribly dramatic. This used to be -heightened whenever she told me off. She used to put drama into ¬everything. When I got into acting, it was just heaven. It was suddenly like being put in the right gear. Everything just seemed right and it felt great.”

Shooting for Brooklyn took place in Ireland and Coney Island, New York, and in Montreal, which stood in for the wide streets, restaurants and department stores of Brooklyn.

There was a stellar supporting cast on both sides of the pond, plus veteran actor Jim Broadbent as Father Flood.

Playing Eilis is the first grown-up role for its 21-year-old star Saoirse Ronan. “Everything that Eilis goes through was exactly what I was going though at that point in my life, and I’m still going through now,” she says. “So emotionally, it was extremely close to where I was at in my own life.”

Director John Crowley, an Irish native now living in England, says, “It’s the part that Saoirse seems to have been waiting for. There’s an intersection there between the actor and the role which happens, I think. If you’re lucky, it happens once in your career and every word that that Saoirse spoke on set she could have just been making up off the top of her head.

“The performance has an immediacy to it and emotional depth that is astonishing. You can’t detach her from that role in any way. It’s completely hers.”

Brooklyn is in cinemas on November 27.