Corrie star Maureen Lipman tells Yours 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 in-demand 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
