‘A grown-up gap year would be brilliant!’ Yours
Corrie star Maureen Lipman tells about love, travel and being busier than ever at 78
When Maureen Lipman’s partner, David Turner, made the romantic suggestion that the pair of them head off into the sunset together, the veteran actress was quite taken with the idea at first.
“He did say to me, ‘Why don’t we take a gap year?’” explains Maureen. “He likes old cars and he’s got one of those old Citroëns that bobs up and down. I just gazed at him and said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He said, ‘You know, we just get in the car and we take a year off.’
“I thought, ‘What a brilliant idea! Two old codgers going around the world. It sounds like a series on Channel Five. Fantastic.’ And then I thought, ‘When?! When am I going to stop long enough to do that?’”
And there’s the rub. Maureen will be 78 in May, but at the present moment is far too indemand to step back from her career, charity work and grandkids, even for such an exciting adventure à deux. When we meet over Zoom, Maureen is warm and witty, worlds away from the waspish battle axe Evelyn Plummer she’s played to great acclaim on Coronation Street since 2018.
The soap role of Tyrone’s (Alan Halsall) long-lost grandmother appealed to Maureen partly because of her long history with the soap – her late husband, Jack Rosenthal, wrote 129 early episodes – and because she says she could hear Evelyn’s voice when she read the part.
“I thought immediately of my aunt, who, when I said I was going to be an actress, said, ‘Aye, when Nelson gets his eye back,’” laughs Maureen, who’s won awards for her portrayal of Evelyn.
“And I thought, ‘Yes, I could do that.’ She’s crusty and difficult and had no space between her brain and her mouth, and I thought, ‘That won’t be a stretch!’ People like Evelyn because she says the things that you wouldn’t dare to say.”
Maureen has her own preferences when it comes to Corrie’s storylines. “They reflect society in the same way as Dickens did,” she says. “For my own personal taste, I would put three women in the snug like it used to be and have them talk about Donald Trump’s hair and the cost of tights.
“That’s what most of our lives are, rather than wondering whose body was pulled out of the river. But then most of television is people being pulled out of rivers and it’s very popular; it’s just not my cup of tea.”
The soap’s demanding schedule means that Maureen shuttles regularly between Manchester and her home in London’s Paddington. But she clearly thrives on a schedule that sounds frantically busy.
“I don’t seem to have the word ‘no’ in my vocabulary,” she muses. ‘Recently one weekend I had three engagements in one day. I was also doing a recital for Jewish Book Week that we had to rehearse and I stopped by Hammerson House, an old folks’ home in Hampstead, on my way back to Manchester, where I did an hour of funny stuff.
‘Two old codgers going around the world’
“I always try to get in time with my grandchildren, Ava, 11, and Sasha, nine. Mostly I’m unpacking and running between my partner’s place and my place. Sometimes I forget where I am – I wake up in the night and I walk into the wall!
“It’s a ridiculous time of my life, but it’s very nice.”
It’s all made slightly more ‘ridiculous’ by the fact that Maureen also tackles daunting stage and film roles in between her stints on Corrie. In 2022 she took on – to great acclaim – a one-woman play, Rose, in Manchester and London before last year landing a West End transfer. Martin Sherman’s play is a sharply drawn portrait of a feisty Jewish woman who reflects on surviving Nazi-occupied Europe and conquering the American dream.
“It was a two-hour monologue of an 80-year-old Jewish woman and was funny and tragic and was a total crowd pleaser,” says Maureen proudly. “It was the best thing I’ve ever done.”
It appears that ‘retirement’ is another word banished from her vocabulary. “I don’t know if there’s any actor easing their way into retirement,” she chortles. “You know, we’re just desperate to work on our deathbed. Touch wood, at the moment I seem to be OK, because we get no time to learn scripts [on Corrie].
“But when you look at Dame Judi [Dench, aged 89], she seems to be doing more than she’s ever done in her life! The idea for actors is that you drop dead in the middle of [Hamlet’s speech] ‘Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,’ get a round of applause and go out.”
Of course, Maureen has much to live for. She’s close to her children Adam and Amy, and her beloved grandchildren. And after losing her husband of 30 years in 2004, and her subsequent partner of 12 years, Egyptian businessman Guido Castro, in January 2021, Maureen considers herself lucky to have found love a third time with Turner, a widower and sports business consultant from north London. They met at a dinner and have been together for a year.
They may not be headed off in David’s old Citroën any time soon, but they’re a firm couple and Maureen is delighted.
“I’m not hugely gifted at this business of love, but I have had three exceptional men who found me interesting or amusing or both,’ she says.
“It does change everything, in the words of the song,” she adds, referring to the Andrew Lloyd Webber tune from Aspects of Love. “I think it’s taken both of us by surprise. Neither of us expected this late love and we’re very grateful that it’s happened because it’s amazing. I wish it for everybody.”
‘I’m not hugely gifted at this business of love’