Lust for life: Maureen Lipman on bringing upbeat comedy Allegra to Scotland
From Coronation Street to the RSC to her latest moving comedy with song and dance, the award-winning national treasure has made a career out of playing characters with a lust for life.
One minute I’m talking with Dame Maureen Lipman, star of stage and screen, national treasure, the next it’s the late Queen, then a ‘sophisticated’ young man in a shop, or some of the various characters she has played over her 60 years in the industry, including nation favourite, Evelyn from Coronation Street. The 80-year-old actor has an ability to drop seamlessly into character, voicing those who pop up in the stories she recounts in conversation.
Best known recently as Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street and appearing on Celebrity Gogglebox, she has a six decades of experience on stage and screen with a TV highlights including Agony, Casualty, Doctor Who, Skins and Jonathan Creek, as well as playing "Beattie," in British Telecom TV commercials and film roles including Educating Rita, The Wildcats of St Trinian's, Carry On Columbus and The Pianist, while her theatre success have seen her nominated for seven Olivier Awards, winning in 1984 for See How They Run. She was made a Dame in the 2020 Queen's Birthday Honours List for her services to charity, entertainment and the arts.
Married to the writer Jack Rosenthal, with whom she had two children, until his death in 2004, she later partnered with Guido Castro, who died in January 2021 after contracting Covid. Last year, at 79, she married businessman David Turner, delighted to find love again.
Lipman is upbeat today, which is fitting as that’s exactly what is required for her latest appearance, starring as Allegra, in the eponymous heart-warming comedy from Olivier and Tony Award-nominated playwright Peter Quilter (End of the Rainbow and Glorious! In which Lipman starred in 2005) and directed and choreographed by three-time Olivier Award winning musical theatre director Stephen Mear (Sunset Boulevard, Mary Poppins, Hello, Dolly!).
“I've never been to Aberdeen,” she says, “so I'm looking forward to that. I had a very good friend who was born in Aberdeen, actress Eve Pearce, and she’d tell me such great stories about growing up in Aberdeen. Glasgow, I know, and I'll be doing the usual treasure hunts at The Burrell and the rest of it.”
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our WhatsApp Channel
The tale of a woman with a zest for life, it follows Allegra who can’t help seeing the bright side and bursting into song, wherever she finds herself, often to an orchestra that plays in her mind. Her brother (John Middleton of Emmerdale) and carer (Elizabeth Bower of Midsomer Murders, Trollied) attempt to manage this behaviour, without raining on her parade.
“It’s about a woman who sings,” says Lipman. “I suppose you'd call her neurodivergent now, because she's half child, half woman, and she has a younger brother, who worries desperately about her.
“It’s about what do you do with someone who is relentlessly happy in this day and age when everybody is snarling on the screen and off? When life is such a worry, and there's a fruitcake at the top of the American presidency. And here's this person who basically finds joy every day. It gets on your nerves when somebody's like that so what do you do about it? You try to bring her down, but then you don't like what you get,” says Lipman.
“From an actor's point of view, you've got to find a way to make her not get on your nerves. That's my job. Because I don't think I've ever run into a character quite like this, half way between Lucille Ball and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.
“She's never done anything with her life except try to cheer people up. She's very sane in places. She can make candid remarks and get away with it because she is so daffy, a bit Lucille Ball. That's the part I'm looking forward to because there's a lot of that. And she does break into song, can’t really sing, but isn’t fazed by people discouraging her.
“She's not a dancer either. Neither am I. But we will do it. Sometimes she says, ‘I know I'm singing when I go in a shop or a restaurant and people don't want it always. Sometimes I can feel negative vibes, particularly when the waiter gets me in a neck hold and drags me out the door. Sometimes they do it to a round of applause. That’s a good sign.’ You see, she can turn everything to the positive.”
Would Lipman like to be like that, personality-wise? She takes a long pause then says, ”Yeah. I think I would. I am the opposite. I turn a positive into a negative. And of course, not to get too deeply into tribalism, it's the pessimists like me, who got out. Probably why I am here.”
Lipman has said her father Maurice was dry and funny, and it’s a trait she has obviously inherited, but she tells me her mother Zelma was also unintentionally very amusing.
“My cousin Simon recently told me he got in a cab, and the driver said he once had to stop the cab with me in it because he was laughing at a story I was telling him about my mother. We were walking along the high street and she said, ‘Oh, I didn't know they had special restaurants in London for lesbians’. And I said ‘What are you talking about? And she said, ‘Well, look.’ And I said ‘Mum, it's a Lebanese restaurant’. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
“What a wonderful thing to get a little message 21 years after she died, saying ‘yeah. I was funny, wasn't I?’ But she didn't know she was funny. She would always say, ‘Why are you laughing?’, so there was an element of poignancy there as well.”
Lipman’s mother’s advice included ‘always accessorise and make sure your hair is right’, something the well-turned out Lipman looks like she follows.
“It does stick,” she says. “You can't be brought up by someone who's really into looking nice without panicking slightly that you haven't got the right colour earrings to match. And of course, that's terribly unfashionable, because you have to have the wrong ones, you know. Who looks at the catwalk and thinks ‘oh, I'd look good in that?’. I mean, you'd look better in a tin of sardines than most of the things, but that's not the purpose of fashion.
“I've always let fashion come to me in the sense that I ignore it, when they say things like, you need new jeans because those are last year's jeans. I hate the rules of it. But at the same time I think I know the look I like. I've never been styled. And sometimes it's very colourful, Pru Leith like, and sometimes… I once bought a Victoria Beckham suit in an outlet and it was obviously sidelined because it was too big for any of the people who would naturally wear it, so it fitted me. And when you have an item like that and you see the tailoring, it's very, very pleasing.
“In fact, a man rang me and said, ‘I bought a suit on eBay and I think it was made by your father. I said, ‘well, my father was a gentleman's outfitter and he sold suits and ties in the shop, but he didn’t sew’. But we met up, and I knew who the tailor was because his daughter was at school with me, and it was immaculate, as was the Victoria Beckham suit. Everything inside was as good as everything outside. So he gave me the suit and it's got Maurice Lipman Tailors, Monument Bridge, Hull, inside it. It's a piece of art really. I also have Guido, my partner of 14 years, his first tuxedo that was made in Cairo in 1947 and it's got the name of the tailor inside and it's fantastic. Well made clothes last. As long as you don't get tired of them, they don't get tired of you.
“I've still got a coat my mother knitted for me when I was at LAMDA in 1965. I went out in it recently and was browsing through a shop and a very sophisticated young man said, ‘mmmm, love your coat’. Where'd you get that?’ I said: ‘You wouldn’t believe me. Sometimes my mother would finish making something and if it wasn't perfect, she would take the whole thing out and start again. That was her character, not mine at all.”
In order to play Allegra, Lipman has taken a break from playing Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street, making a fan-favorite of the prickly, witty matriarch with a very hidden softer side since her arrival in 2018.
“Evelyn’s gone to study law at university. Law, with special emphasis on dogs,” she says. “I didn't get killed off, so it's always open to me to go back. This week I got a picture from the Dobbs family saying we miss you. And honestly, I really do miss them.
“I know it sounds a bit actressy, but in every job you meet three or four people who fill your life for that period and you bond. Then it's a question of whether you keep up. And we have had some good reunions - Oklahoma! we didn't quite get Hugh Jackman back, but got him on tape, and A Little Night Music with Hannah Waddingham and Jessie Buckley, what ever happened to those girls?
“Essentially we are strolling players and stroll on. But I think if I give them enough notice, and ask for a storyline that would encompass Evelyn, because I don't want to come back and just stand at the bar and say, ‘mine’s a brandy, you’re paying…’
“Because she is such a super character. For all the opposite reasons to Allegra, because she's always got a fast retort and she's manipulative. I’ve always liked to ring the changes, but I don't like to give her up.
“Corrie is a phenomenon. It's good, it's bad, it's full of murderers and lesbians and kids and animals. Well, my dog, Cerberus. He knew on his last day that it was his last day. He lay on the floor and had the fake cannula taped to his leg, and it was honestly tragic.”
Cerberus was Evelyn’s constant companion from 2018 until his storyline death of kidney failure in March 2023, and had fans in high places as became clear when the 95-year-old Queen Elizabeth II visited the Coronation Street set in 2021 on its 60th anniversary to applaud the crew and cast for continuing production during Covid.
“The Queen said to me, [Lipman reproduces the Queen’s voice] ‘Is the dog a good actor? How long has he been with the company?’
“I said, ‘Well, he came with me, ma’am, and yes, he's a very, very, very good actor. I keep a lot of liver in my clothes’. He was a beautiful, greyhound-Saluki cross, maybe a little bit of lurcher, and was just wonderful. I can never quite get the same feeling for the replica dog that Roy took on.”
That’s Roy Cropper, of Roy’s Rolls cafe. Will he and Evelyn ever become a couple?
“People wanted us to get together, but it could never be. And it's much better, as Keats says, ‘bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal,’ you know. You want to always keep the possibility there but not give people what they want, because that's the end of it. Once a character gets hitched, then the storylines become far less interesting and more like real life.”
In real life Lipman married businessman David Turner, co-founder of the LA Fitness gym chain, in September last year in London.
“Normally David would come too,” she says of her journey north of the Border, “but that's not going to happen. I’ll be on the road myself. He said ‘I'll come to Brighton and be with you on the first night’, and I said, ‘You better not do that because you'd apply for divorce - we’ve only been married for six months - I will not be livable with.”
Lipman is delighted to have married again at 79, after proposing to Turner on a train from Edinburgh ‘as a joke’, but he accepted. Where did they meet?
“I met him at a lunch, and he was getting over the loss of his wife of 50 years. Then later I engineered a reason to ask him to come to something I was introducing called The Human Spirit Choir where I had to speak about the human spirit. And he has a poetry website, and writes around the poems, and so I was reading this and getting to know him in a way online and this particular week there was something about the human spirit. So I felt emboldened to say, ‘oh, what a coincidence!’.
“It’s funny, there's a picture of David in the bedroom when he was about 17, and I looked at it and said, ‘I've danced with that boy’. I said, ‘did you go to this particular youth club?’ No, he was in London, I was in Hull. Did he go on a convention? No. I said, ‘did you ever go to The Green Park Hotel in Bournemouth?’ He said, ‘every year’. I said, ‘well, you asked me to dance. And you never came back for a second dance.’ And he said, ‘Well, I was just waiting to be the right age.’
I suggest she could write another autobiography, continue her story but she demurs.
“No. The last thing I want to be is smug. There are enough lonely hearts out there. I know that a big, angry bird in the sky can come and peck anytime. But certainly, it has been a fantastic experience to get to this stage in one's life when you really want to just marry someone. You want to just settle down. I just moved in with my box of shoes, box of pants. It's just like coming home. And his kids, and his grandkids, well, his son and my son used to go to school together and actually wrote together for a while and my daughter lives around around the corner so we see each other all the time, and that’s great. So I don't really want to go away. It's the truth.”
But she will because she’s a trouper and loves performing and shows no sign of slowing down. What's on her bucket list that she still wants to do?
“As long as I can remember my lines, I want to carry on doing this. I would like somebody, somewhere, to think of me as something other than a Jewish mother or Holocaust survivor. I‘d like to be asked to do a series. Everybody's doing Netflix streaming. It would be very nice to be asked to do that rather than chasing.
“Well, I've reached a stage where if the phone doesn't ring, I'm not terrified, but I have lots of girlfriends of my age who are. It's a very precarious life for a woman on her own in this business.
“I'm rewatching Call My Agent at the moment and it's everything that I love. Wonderful characters. In a way, like Jack would have written. You find a base for your characters, whether taxi drivers or firemen, find a central place where they meet then you spin off from that.
“And I’ve always thought, and I spoke to them at ITV, about giving Evelyn a spinoff at university, because I think the idea would be…
At this point, the online connection is lost, but with Lipman it’s safe to say,
‘To be continued.’
Maureen Lipman stars in Allegra at Aberdeen’s His Majesty’s Theatre, Tuesday 26 Saturday, 30 May; Glasgow Theatre Royal, Monday 22 - Saturday 27 June
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.