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Maureen Lipman – ‘I’ve always been quite conventional, and suddenly there I was, flying off having liaisons’ |
‘How do I do it all? With charm and Redoxon’
Maureen Lipman’s new book may suggest she’s ‘Past It’, but with a dizzying amount of TV, stage and charity work lined up, her life has never been more hectic, writes Ruth Gorb
MAUREEN Lipman has crossed the border. After almost 30 years in bosky Muswell Hill she has left north London for the West. Bayswater? Notting Hill? No, she says; we call it the Paddington Basin.
She still says “we”. Her late husband Jack Rosenthal is still very much with her – she visits him in the Hoop Lane cemetery – and they had decided before he died that the time had come to move into the centre of town.
“Now I have this gorgeous bachelor-ette flat,” she says. “High ceilings, two courtyards, one for the rabbit, one for flowers. No regrets at all.”
She was still in her pyjamas and on to her third cup of tea. It was supposed to be her day off. Ha-ha.
She has a new book just out, she’s working on another one, she’s filming a television series, is about to play Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music at The Chocolate Factory, and there’s all the charity work… Does she actually enjoy it?
“I’m really indolent by nature,” she says. “I just can’t say no. How do I do it all? I get by on charm and Redoxon.”
The schedule at the moment is mind-blowing. She is working on the transfer to television of Ladies of Letters, originally on Radio 4 with Prunella Scales and Patricia Routledge. She and her co-star Anne Reid agree that it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done.
“You’re on alone, in front of the cameras, for a long time,” she says. “Then you have to go home and learn 18 pages for the next day. It’s 10 episodes in six weeks. We’ll do it, but we’re both paralysed with fear. And in the middle of it all Trevor Nunn asked me to be in A Little Night Music. I’m doing that on Saturdays.”
So much for the title of the new book, Past-It Notes. Hardly past it, she looks better and works harder than ever before.
The book, she says, you could call her “Complete Oeuvres”, or “The Best Of.” It is a collection of past wit and wisdom, plus some more, and is laugh-aloud funny, zany, and full of excruciating puns.
But it is also immensely affectionate – her infamous and beloved mother, Zelma, figures large – and occasionally painful.
She has had some very tough times, but the laughs are never far away. Is writing it all down compulsive? “I only ever write to order,” Maureen says. “And like I said, I can’t say no. Imagine being asked to write a poem about beef for the Meat Marketing Board when I was grieving for Jack.”
Yes, she did it.
The book ends with what she calls her year of living dangerously. It was the year of an obsessive affair which became very public – if you read those sort of newspapers. She isn’t used to the paparazzi and was appalled by her sudden notoriety. The affair is well and truly over, but she decided she couldn’t write this book without saying something about it. “I cut out the worst bits,” she says. “I tried to make universal.”
Maureen’s story will indeed ring horrible bells with anyone who has been through a disastrous affair. She was passionately in love, and knew it was all wrong.
Looking back on it now, she says charitably that if there was a fool in the equation, it was her.
“To blame the other person is totally inaccurate,” she says. “I had my eyes firmly closed.”
She thinks she became a different person, on a huge conduit to what she used to be before Jack.
“I was never very good at the courting game,” she says. “Suddenly I was back there, minus the puff-ball skirt. I’ve always been quite conventional, and suddenly there I was, flying off having liaisons, having a Barbara Cartland time – a wild child.”
She is in calmer waters now. She has a special friend, a “nice gentleman to walk out with”, a Jack sort of man. But the restlessness stays with her, the need to run a career and a home and a private life – “It’s a huge arrogance to think you can do it all,” she admits.
Even when she’s deadly serious the jokes bubble up. It’s been like that ever since her four-year-old imitation of Alma Cogan, the need to perform, to make people laugh.
Her own life supplies the jokes, what with a sex-starved tortoise, and the naturopathic cure that involved inhaling beetroot juice through her right nostril, and the night when she was at a charity dinner sitting next to the Princess Royal and her mother, two seats away, leaned forward and hissed that her bridgework had come out in the lamb chop.
And things continue to happen to her. Only the other day she went to Harry Morgan’s in St Johns Wood for salt beef, and as she was going to get the car a woman told her that her dog had done a poo.
“So there’s Maureen Lipman, she draws up in a car, takes a plastic bag, picks up a piece of shit… What can that have looked like?”
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