Looks back at who else has been made a Great British dame as Mary Berry and Maureen Lipman join their ranks

BAKING queen Mary Berry and Coronation Street’s Maureen Lipman were both made dames in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list and join an illustrious list of groundbreaking women.

Former Great British Bake Off judge Mary was marked out for the honour after six decades of cookery broadcasting and writing.

The 85-year-old also received a CBE eight years ago for services to culinary arts and has written more than 70 cookbooks.

Maureen is being recognised for services to charity, entertainment and the arts following her 50-year career in TV and film. The 74-yearold, who plays Evelyn Plummer on Corrie, made one of her early big screen appearances in 1968 film Up The Junction, starring alongside Dennis Waterman and Suzy

Kendall. She also appeared in the BT adverts of the 1980s as doting gran Beattie.

Those that have been given the royal seal of approval in the past include Helen Mirren who was made a dame in 2000. Talk show host Michael Parkinson called her “the sex queen of the Royal Shakespeare Company” in 1975, and the 75-year-old star of The Queen and has played a monarch six times in films.

She once said: “Actors are rogues and vagabonds – or they ought to be. I can’t stand it when they behave like solicitors from Penge. I’m a would-be rebel. The good girl who’d like to be a bad one.”

Movies like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music made Julie Andrews an international star, but she first appeared on the stage when she was just a child.

Both her parents were music hall performers. By the age of 20 she was starring in Cinderella at the London Palladium.

The 85-year-old became a dame in 1999 and has said: “I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it...”

Maggie Smith has won two Oscars and appeared in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films. She was made a dame in 1990.

The 85-year-old began her career at the Oxford Playhouse in the 1950s, appearing alongside Laurence Olivier in Othello in 1965. “I longed to be bright and most certainly never was,” she said. “I was rather hopeless, I suspect.”

Oscar winner Judi Dench, aged 85, has played James

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Food writer and former Great British Bake Off judge Mary Berry, pictured in 1982 Maureen Lipman was the star of BritishTelecom adverts that were a huge hit in the 1980s

Diana Rigg in 1965, just before taking on the role of Emma Peel in The Avengers, and (below) as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones

Joan Collins Patricia Routledge in the play How’s The World Treating You, in 1966

Judi Dench modelling for Christian Dior, below, Julie Andrews as a child

Maggie Smith