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Maureen Lipman CBE (born 10 May, 1946), is a British film, theatre and television actress, columnist, and comedienne.

Lipman was born in Kingston upon Hull, where her father Maurice was a tailor: he used to have a shop between the Ferens Art Gallery and Monument Bridge. She was encouraged into an acting career by her mother Zelma, who used to take her to the pantomime and push her onto the stage.

She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and married dramatist Jack Rosenthal in 1974 (he died in 2004), and has had a number of roles in his works. She has two grown-up children, writers Amy and Adam Rosenthal. She has recently (2006) adopted a basenji puppy, called Diva.

She is a Zionist and a Labour Party supporter.

Work

Lipman worked extensively in the theatre before gaining prominence on television in the 1979 situation comedy Agony, in which she played an agony aunt with a troubled private life. She played the lead role in the television series All at No 20 and took on a range of diverse characters in the series About Face. She is well-known for playing Joyce Grenfell in her biographical show Re:Joyce and as "Beattie", a Jewish grandmother in a series of television commercials for British Telecom (she named the character from the initials BT) . She has continued to work in the theatre for over thirty years, playing, amongst other roles, Aunt Eller in the National Theatre's Oklahoma! with Hugh Jackman. In 2002, she played a snooty landlady, Lillian, in Coronation Street, and the mother in Roman Polanski's award-winning film The Pianist. In recent years, she has narrated two television series on the subject of design, one for UKTV about Art Deco and one about 20th century design for ITV/Sky Travel. She wrote a monthly column for Good Housekeeping magazine for over ten years and recently penned a weekly column in The Guardian in the newspaper's G2 section. She performed in the 2006 series of Doctor Who in the episode entitled The Idiot's Lantern as "The Wire", and until April 29 2006 played Florence Foster Jenkins in the Olivier Award nominated show Glorious! at the Duchess Theatre in London's West End. After her playwright husband's death in May 2004 she completed his autobiography By Jack Rosenthal, and played herself in her daughter's four-part adaptation of the book, Jack Rosenthal's Last Act on BBC Radio Four in July 2006. She has created several volumes of autobiography from her Good Housekeeping columns and recently published The Gibbon's In Decline But The Horse Is Stable, a book of animal poems which is illustrated by established cartoonists including Posy Simmonds and Gerald Scarfe, to raise money for the International Myeloma Foundation, to combat the cancer to which she lost her husband.

Awards and nominations

• She was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Comedy Performance in 1985 (1984 season) for See How They Run.
• Her show, Live and Kidding, performed at the Duchess Theatre, was nominated for a 1998 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Entertainment of the 1997 season.
• She was awarded the C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire) in 1999.
• In 2003 she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for The Pianist (2002), at The Polish Film Awards.

Quotes

"An ology. He gets an ology and he says he's failed. You get an ology, you're a scientist!" (as "Beattie" in a British Telecom Advertising Campaign)

Political criticism

Lipman supported Israel during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. On July 13 2006, in a debate on the BBC's This Week, she argued that "human life is not cheap to the Israelis, and human life on the other side is quite cheap actually, because they strap bombs to people and send them to blow themselves up." These comments was condemned by Muslim political columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who said "Brutally straight, she sees no equivalence between the lives of the two tribes" Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, "Nothing but anti-Arab racism can fully explain the behaviour of the Israelis ",The Independent,July 17 2006 and left-wing journalist John Pilger, who in the New Statesman criticized the BBC for allowing Lipman - whom he described as "a Jew and promoter of selective good causes" - to present her allegedly insensitive remarks without, in his view, any "serious challenge." John Pilger, "Empire: war and propaganda", New Statesman, July 31 2006 Lipman responded to Alibhai-Brown's accusation of racism by arguing that the columnist had deliberately misrepresented Lipman's comments as generalizations about Muslims rather than specific comments about terrorists Maureen Lipman, Letters, The Independent, July 19 2006.

In the Jewish Chronicle, Lipman argued that media reporting of the conflict was "heavily distorted":

Other appearances

• She has appeared a few times on Just a Minute, The News Quiz, That Reminds Me, This Week and Have I Got News For You.

References

Select filmography

• Agony (1979) — Jane Lucas
• Educating Rita (1983) — Trish
• A Little Princess (1986) — Miss Minchin
• Carry On Columbus (1992) — Countess Esmeralda
• Eskimo Day (1996) — Shani Whittle
• The Pianist (2002) — Mother
• Coronation Street (2002) — Lilian
• Doctor Who (The Idiot's Lantern) (2006) — The Wire

External links

• A short bio of Maureen Lipman
• Maureen Lipman's Guardian column
• Maureen Lipman in webTV interview talking about By Jack Rosenthal and working on Doctor Who

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