ACTRESS MAUREEN LIPMAN A has been a permanent fixture on stage and screen ever since she graduated from drama school in her early twenties. Whether in serious films like Polanski's The Pianist, in TV sitcoms like Agony (as the suffocating Jewish mother, Beattie), in the long-running British Telecom TV ads, and currently as the monstrous Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street, no one can doubt her ubiquity.
Now, at 76, she's taking on one of her most challenging roles ever. Playwright Martin Sherman wrote Rose at the end of the 1990s with Maureen Lipman in mind. "But I was then in my early fifties," she says, "too young for the role." In the event, it was played by the late Olympia Dukakis at the National and then by Janet Suzman in Chichester.
"But when director Scott Le Crass came to me last year with the suggestion that I was now the right age for the part, it turned out to be a marriage made in Hendon. We quickly eased into lockdown mode where we rehearsed either in the garden of my basement flat in Paddington or in a greenhouse in Media City in Salford, if I was up there for Coronation Street."
She has nothing but praise for Sherman. "He's American but with a European sensibility and he writes quite extraordinarily well for women." Almost 40 years ago, she'd appeared in his play, Messiah, an experience that brought her to the brink of a breakdown.
"The play was all about love and refugees, a companion piece to Rose. The main character, Rachel, would have conversations out loud with God. It was extremely intense and went to parts of my psyche I didn't really want to examine. I got through it but I almost cracked up.
This story is from the August 2022 edition of Reader's Digest UK.
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This story is from the August 2022 edition of Reader's Digest UK.
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