Maureen Lipman CBE © TopFoto/UPPA

If you were limited to one word to describe the talents of Maureen Lipman, it would be a real challenge - but perhaps ‘versatile’ would fit the bill. After all - anyone who can make us laugh in ‘Grumpy Old Women’, wow audiences with her song and dance routines in ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’ at the Shaftesbury Theatre, become a national icon as Beattie in the long-running BT ads, break our hearts as Trish in the 1983 film ‘Educating Rita’ and provide a damned good read in her newspaper columns and books - has got to be versatile.

That versatility is very much in evidence in her two latest roles. On the one hand, she plays an alien invader who invades TV sets in Doctor Who, a job she clearly loved. “This will probably earn me my entire year’s worth of street cred. …It was great” she wrote in her Guardian column in January 2006 after she’d shot the scenes.

On the other hand, she’s on stage at the Duchess Theatre in London until 29 April 2006 in ‘Glorious!’ as an eccentric soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins. Maureen Lipman can sing, but this role, based on a true story, requires her to sing out of tune in just the right way. “I try to tread a fine line, allowing the voice to slide all over the place, but doing it as someone who heard the music right in her head. It’s not easy…” she said in an interview for the Guardian last November. It may not be easy, but she’s had rave reviews and The Stage described her as “having unquestionable star quality”.

Like virtually everyone who comes from this little island country of ours, Maureen Lipman’s ancestors aren’t from England. Her grandparents may have been born here, but her great grandparents were from Russia and Lithuania. Maureen herself was born in Hull and it’s a place she has huge fondness for. She nominated the Humber Bridge as one of her icons of England and when she was interviewed by the ICONS Project, she had plenty to say about this waterfront city on the north east coast.

“There’s something delicious to me about going back to Hull. It’s the same thing David Hockney saw when he painted all around Driffield – the incredible beauty in the flatlands”.

She has fond memories of fish and chips in her hometown. “Its an addiction really - you have to have fish and chips once a month. Once a year [in Hull] you used to walk down Walton Street because of the fair and the street was so exciting. You were out at night and your gloves are hanging by their elastic from your sleeves and you stopped off and bought fish and chips – it was absolute nirvana. You ate it with your gloves on and your gloves were smelly for weeks. It was wonderful”.

The sheer variety of the country she lives in is an important factor in Maureen Lipman’s endless enthusiasm for it. “It’s the way it changes from one place to another. Kentish Town is different to Hampstead, Suffolk is different to Norfolk. It’s only when you’re up in a plane and you look down at it all laid out like luncheon meat in a delicatessan that you realise how England is such a tiny place. Yet it has a different feel in every county and all of it is full of history and incredibly pretty. It never ceases to engage the eye. The seasons complement that – it changes even on the bleakest day. There’s always a small ray of sunshine”.

Lipman is not a soft touch though and she’s not always happy with everything she sees.

“In general, the English have too much suspicion and not enough curiosity.  The class system means we don’t stray enough into each other’s cultures. I often take people to see that wonderful Hindu temple just off the North Circular road - you know, the one right next door to Kwik Fit - but I wouldn’t dream  of asking to go in and see it. But if I was abroad, I might well wander into a Bah’ai church. [In England] one feels that there are a lot of glass barriers between cultures, a lot of glass ceilings for ethnic groups and for women too of course… all sorts of invisible barriers that stop us fulfilling our potential as human beings”.

Her pet hate is the London Congestion Charge – along with a few other things. “[It] has destroyed business and the theatre. I was saying to a friend of mine, it’s amazing – we’ve got a hit show [with ‘Glorious!’] with rave reviews - and the houses are just about respectable and we’re lucky to be on because five shows are closing next week. The West End was a place you could come into, but the bendy bus, the speed bump and the prying camera that gives you a £100 fine if you stray into a bus lane [have stopped all that]”.

In many other ways, she’s a fan of modernity though.“I love the shock of the new”.

She’s recently hit local headlines in her Muswell Hill home  for supporting a Gaudi-style shop frontage the Council want to remove. “I’m all for it, I love Gaudi”. And she’s made a name for herself as a presenter on architecture in the TV series ‘In Search of Style’. “I love the idea of architectural evolution very much”.

So the role of presenter is the latest in Maureen Lipman’s endless list of talents – but acting is the role that most of us know her for. So it’s interesting to discover that this was an option at the bottom of her career-list as a child. “I found an old exercise book from school where I wrote down what I wanted to be. Number one was an air hostess, number two a dress designer and number three was an actress – so I suppose I have failed!”

Here, surely, is one failure we should all be grateful for.




WE ALSO ASKED MAUREEN LIPMAN TO COMMENT ON OUR FIRST 12 NOMINATIONS…

Holbein’s portrait of King Henry Viii

“His legs are a long way apart. The thing about the picture is that he looks pretty mean - those little slitty eyes – both mean and powerful. The idea of a man who changed a country’s religion  because he wanted sex is quite iconic. He actually created his own religion in order to get his leg over – that’s quite incredible”.

Alice in Wonderland

“It’s really about the rites of passage between childhood and adulthood. That’s something the English are good at writing about. It’s like Jack’s play, Barmitzvah Boy [Maureen Lipman was married to the playwright Jack Rosenthal until his death in 2004] – how do to take on the mantle of adulthood without losing the wonder of childhood? There’s also something slightly seedy about Alice in Wonderland - is there something sexual going on?”

Punch and Judy

“It’s violence, isn’t it? It externalises all our fears – it is a bit like Bernard Manning you know – if you put the nastiness in a small box, perhaps you don’t have to think about your own faults. It makes you feel better about yourself if you think other people are worse than you”.

King James Bible

“This has some of the most beautiful passages in it  - as indeed does the Old Testament - but it’s written by men and it’s for men and it would be as well to rewrite it in the light of the fact that there are two sexes in the world”.