Never let it be said Dame Maureen Lipman doesn’t suffer for her art. Along with many of us, she’s been crying buckets all week having had to have her dog put down.
Well, Cerberus, the greyhound belonging to Evelyn Plummer, the character she plays in Coronation Street. And, judging by the outpouring of grief on Twitter, the nation mourns with her.
Cerberus inadvertently ate an Eccles cake on the floor of Roy Cropper’s cafe and the currants triggered kidney failure. Evelyn had to take the agonising decision to put him out of his misery.
Maureen says: “The animal looked so hangdog on its last day, I swear he knew the storyline. It was incredibly sad. One of the girls in make-up asked if I needed a tear stick. I told her I needed something to stop me crying, not start me.”
What didn’t help was that it reawakened real memories from her own life.
“Last year, my 16-year-old dog Diva had to be put down. She’d been coughing for weeks so I knew it was the end.
“The awful thing was, I was filming in Salford so I had to say goodbye to her on Zoom. It was horrible. The story with Cerberus brought all that back.”
Maureen, 76, describes Evelyn as “a terrible old bat”. But she’s no stretch to play, she says. “We’re very alike. Like her, I am assertive, I do stand my ground but, unlike her, I don’t steal bottles of brandy from convenience stores.
“But I know that woman inside out. I know where she shops, I know why she’s tight. I know why she wouldn’t get her vest off when she had a lover.”
The loss of her adored pet inevitably drives a wedge in Evelyn’s relationship with Roy. “She’s not a very forgiving person but, on the other hand, Roy is the nearest thing she has to a friend. They’re on opposite ends of the same spectrum.”
Maureen is about to uncover new layers of grief when she brings her searing performance of Rose to the West End in a two-hour monologue by playwright Martin Sherman.
It first saw the light of day when it was filmed for Sky in 2020. It then had a sold-out run at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre in front of a paying audience.
“That was a bit more scary because you couldn’t stop and start as you can when you’re filming. Once you step on to the carousel, there’s no getting off. It’s like jumping out of an aeroplane and hoping your parachute will open.”
Rose was a big hit when it eventually transferred to North London’s Park Theatre and now it will move into the West End at the Ambassadors Theatre from May 23.
Rose’s tumultuous journey takes her from the devastation of Nazi-occupied Europe to the allure of the American dream. Through the life of one woman, we see the story of a century where everything changed except the violence of the strong against the weak.
It has been a sell-out everywhere and warmly received by the critics. Even so, Maureen is a mistress of self-deprecation. “Not so long ago, a woman said to me that she’d seen me in a one-woman show. ‘Rose?’ I said. ‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘As Joyce Grenfell, perhaps?’ No, she didn’t think so.
“So, I wondered aloud who she might be talking about. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I fell asleep when it started and didn’t wake up until the clapping at the end.’”
Reminded of the upcoming four-week season, her stomach does a somersault, she says. “I’m 76. I need to be in very good nick to do this play. I don’t want to be waking up at 5.40am as I did this morning.
“I did get quite stressed before it opened at the Park Theatre last summer and I got shingles when it closed. But it’s worth it.
“It’s a very considerable piece of work. And it’s never been more relevant: it starts in the Ukraine and it’s about the Russian invasion.” The West End management were keen to extend this latest season. “But I’m under contract to Coronation Street and they’ve been generous with giving me time off.”
Maureen is obliged to appear on Weatherfield’s cobbles until September and she might well stay another year, she says, depending on what else is on the horizon. “I like being part of a company. I call Corrie the National Theatre of Television.”
The soap is particularly close to her heart because her late husband, Jack Rosenthal, wrote for it all those years ago. “He wrote Episode 13,” she says, “and I’m currently working on Episode 10,962. I told that to Her Majesty when she visited a couple of years ago.”
Maureen, who became a national treasure in the 1988 BT ad where she proclaimed to her grandson, ‘You got an ology’ as he despaired about his exam results, is a royalist and a big fan of the King. She is much looking forward to the Coronation. Does she feel Harry and Meghan should attend?
“That’s a tough one. Overall, the whole thing would go better without them. Their narcissism coupled with their self-promotion is just awful. If they want their privacy so much, why do they behave as they do? But, if I was in charge, I’d say everyone is welcome, this is where you’re sitting, now just get on with it. Alternatively, if those plans don’t suit you, then don’t come.”
Maureen is a keen advocate, she says, of free speech. “The trouble is, if you acquire celebrity status, whatever that means, you’re forever being asked about everything from knicker elastic to your favourite weekend.”
Her most recent public outing was on the stage of the London Palladium for an evening organised by Gyles Brandreth in which he assembled eleven Dames – Judi Dench, Joanna Lumley, Floella Benjamin, Twiggy, and Joan Collins among them.
“The first thing to say is that the event raised over £100,000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital where Gyles’s young grandson had been treated for cancer,” she says. “Sheila Hancock came out of hospital aged 90 to be part of it. I wrote and recited a poem about all the other Dames. Patricia Routledge was indomitable at 94 singing, I Went to a Marvellous Party.
“The surprise of the evening was Joan Collins reciting the words to John Lennon’s Imagine.” And how was that? “No comment,” she says, chuckling.
She would like to work with Gyles again as they did on Celebrity Gogglebox. “We thought we were very funny but, time and again, all those bits got edited out.
“It seemed that all they wanted was each of us going, ‘Yeuch’. I thought I was there to review programmes, not sit around looking at assorted willies.
“So, in the end, I told them to sling their hook.”
- Rose runs at the Ambassadors Theatre from May 23. Tickets available from www.roseonstage.co.uk
