At 76, Maureen Lipman has never been busier. Since 2018, she’s played Tyrone Dobbs’s grandmother, Evelyn Plummer, in Corrie. “She’s an appalling old boot,” she says, “but I really love her. They keep trying to give her a softer side which I enthusiastically resist.”
She happily acknowledges that certain roles in a career stick much longer than others. “It’s never the things you’d like to stick, never the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost. It’s Evelyn and, before that, Beattie.”
Maureen was cast as the suffocating Jewish mother in the British Telecom TV ads in late 1987. “They were going to call her Doris. I put them right on that.” What started as a clutch of eight short sketches mushroomed as the character took off.”
She’s just signed another year-long contract to keep playing Evelyn. “I like the steadiness of it and the fact I have to keep learning. It’s good for my brain: I’m not a crossword or Suduku person.”
She doesn’t feel she’s dumbing down by appearing in Corrie. “When taxi drivers ask me what I’m doing and I tell them I’m in Coronation Street, they tend to go: ‘Aah, something will come up. I never watch it’. And I mutter, ‘Well, I never drive a cab’.”
“I won’t hear a word against it. It’s full of exceptional actors working with very little rehearsal, very little direction. Am I envious of some of my peers? Sometimes, yes. Do I have the right to be? Of course not. Would I like to be in Sex Education (A Nextflix hit show, starring Gillian Anderson)? Yes, of course. Am I sorry I’ve signed up with Corrie for another year? No, I’m not.”
That said, she’s currently taking a break from the soap to appear in a one-woman play, Rose, written by Martin Sherman.
Almost 40 years ago, she appeared in Sherman’s play Messiah, an experience that brought her to the brink of a breakdown. “The play was all about love and refugees. The main character, Rachel, used to have conversations out loud with God. It was extremely intense. I got through it but I almost cracked up.
“One night a man in the audience stood up and shouted at me for blaspheming. Somehow, I managed to carry on but, after the final curtain, I collapsed. I couldn’t stop crying.”
Her new play, Rose, charts the life of a Jewish woman through much of the last century. How will she get through it?
“I need to sleep and I’m a very poor sleeper. I’ve got to be in the best of health and then I’ll be on top of it. I’m trying to tell myself that it will be like An Evening With… except not with Maureen but with Rose.”
This seamless body of work earned Maureen a Damehood last year with Prince Charles performing the honours. She’s a big fan despite the controversy surrounding Charles and Camilla's relationship.
“The fact that he’s got opinions which have been proven to be right all along, and despite the laughter which initially greeted them, says much about him. He was ahead of the curve on climate change. He was derided as a tree-hugger. He was one of the first to talk about GM foods. Why on earth shouldn’t we have an intelligent King?”
She also won’t hear a word against his mother. She’s full of praise following the now-famous skit involving the Queen, Paddington Bear and a marmalade sandwich that, for many, was the highlight of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
“I have it in mind to suggest to Bafta that Her Majesty should receive an award as Best Newcomer in a Short Film for her impeccable timing while working in challenging circumstances. But then, she’s been acting all her life – and jolly good at it, she is, too.”
Maureen is someone with strong opinions, made more palatable, more noticeable, because they’re laced with humour. “I am an actress,” she says, at one point, “not an actor, and, if somebody tries to take the word ‘woman’ away from me, I shall be very cross.”
But she’s becoming increasingly concerned, she says, about putting her head above the parapet. “Do I want to become like Sheila Hancock and her self-declared position of ‘old rage’, as she calls it?
“I’ll be on a stage on my own in Rose and anyone could stand up and take a pot shot at me. I feel what I feel strongly but I am nervous about making myself vulnerable in a public place. What’s to stop someone taking out a prominent Jew?”
She drops her shoulders and smiles. She’s been her own now following the death last year of her partner Guido Castro and, before him, her playwright husband, Jack Rosenthal, who succumbed to cancer in 2004.
“I’m not necessarily looking for love although there’s much to be said, if you have to get up to go to the loo in the night, returning to that leg in the bed, if you know what I mean. I don’t expect to find it a third time but I do have faith in life to throw me a curve ball.
“Mind you, I’m not sure I’m up to getting my kit off again. But it could happen. I’m still pretty feisty,” she adds.
Rose is at the Hope Mill Theatre in Salford from August 29 – September 11 and at the Park Theatre in north London from September 13 – October 16