‘I think the only thing that’s going to slow me down, marginally, is death’
At 78, Dame Maureen Lipman has no intention of easing up on her busy life
It was all a bit Notting Hill. I had to show up at the Petersham Hotel at an allotted time, told which subjects I shouldn’t bring up, not to go over my 20-minute slot and, when I went in, there were two ‘minders’ in the room.
Not that Maureen Lipman was aware of any of this. We had all just heard, minutes before, that Dame Maggie Smith had died that morning and Lipman (also a Dame), was tearful. Luckily for me, the nice chap from The Times went in before me, so she was a little more together when it came to my turn.
Lipman is one of those actresses whose looks seem hardly to have changed over the decades, with just a greying of the hair. Always beautifully turned out, she is friendly and chatty, despite just hearing sad news.
Trained at LAMDA, her breadth of work is astonishing – more than 30 West End shows; TV (Agony, Gogglebox] and film and she’s a prolific writer. And now she’s got a new audience as the straight-laced but vulnerable Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street. ‘I keep being rediscovered as an actress. I’ve been here for a very long time.’
I tell her that when I interviewed Jenni Éclair a few years back for her role in Panto, I asked her why she was doing it. ‘The money’, she’d replied – was it the same for Lipman? She laughs, but says no, ‘It’s the buzz. You have different reasons for doing different things. I did Rose (her one-woman show) last year which was incredibly hard but was the best script I’ve seen. I did Corrie, because, you know, it took me back to Jack in a way.’
She was married to the playwright Jack Rosenthal for 30 years until his death in 2004 and he was a regular writer in the early years of the show. She explains they had a lot more time to finesse an episode in those days, as now ‘You learn everything the night before, you go in and read as a cast and then you film it. If you do two cracks at it, it’s generally because the boom was in shot. I’m grateful to it for keeping my brain alive.’
When we talk, she’d just met the Panto cast for the first time and loves the creation of the small world within a theatre: ‘In my experience, every job gives you a little family. You always go away from each show with two or three that become distant cousins. It’s just so lovely.’
So, onto her role in Beauty and the Beast. ‘I am going to be Mrs Potty. I mean obviously I haven’t gone through life thinking “if only could play Mrs Potty”, but it is challenging. With Panto, you have to let them join in, but not all the time – you have to say, this is the part where you listen. And then you know, if you remember as a child there’s always a love song and you just think, oh shit, where’s my Sherbert Dip?’
Being Jewish, she’s not fazed by working through Christmas. ‘It’s always an odd time, because do I celebrate it, yes, I do, but you know did Jews have turkeys? I don’t know. I mean I never know what to do at Christmas, so working through has always been quite nice for me.’
She’s played at Richmond Theatre many times over the years. ‘Everything I have done has gone from here to the West End. It’s like a launching pad, but it’s also got its own little life.’ Living in North London, it’s a short trip to work, sometimes visiting Kew Gardens or popping in for a pie at Maids of Honour. ‘I have a kind chap, who will come and pick me up at the end of the show, run me a bath and also just be there, you know?’
The kind chap is now her fiancé, Daivd Turner. She had a long-term partnership with computer expert Guido Castro, until his death in 2021 and met Turner, the co-founder of LA Fitness gym chain, a couple of years ago. She jokingly asked him to marry her recently. He said yes, so she now unexpectedly finds herself engaged at the age of 78.
I congratulate her and ask if she thinks love will let her slow down: ‘He’s worse than me, he is just an absolute dynamo. He never stops from morning till night.’ So, she has no intention of taking it easy: ‘I think the only thing that’s going to slow me down, marginally, is death.’
Which brings us, inevitably, back to Dame Maggie Smith, whom she much admired, but felt she could never live up to: ‘We had this phone call once and I said to her “I always feel with you that I can never forget that I was an understudy and you were such a star.” And she said, “Oh darling, we all feel like imposters most of the time, don’t we?”. Well, she was no imposter. That face, those eyes, she was just different and very witty and sharp. I mean she was just astonishing. Nobody got more out of a line than Dame Maggie Smith.’
She says, regretfully, that she has never been offered the classical roles that went to Smith. She reflects for a minute, then says ‘But I suppose Maggie wasn’t offered Gogglebox…’
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Panto: Beauty & The Beast at Richmond Theatre. Book tickets here.