Maureen Lipman

Rose

Maureen Lipman DBE has been an actress and writer for fifty-four years. She was born in Hull, East Rising of Yorkshire, and trained at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art).

At the start of a long and distinguished career in theatre, she spent three happy years with the National Theatre Company at The Old Vic led by Sir Laurence Olivier. She appeared in Re:Joyce, an acclaimed on-woman tribute to Joyce Grenfell which ran several times over five years in the West End. Other self-written one-woman shows include Live and Kidding (Duchess Theatre) and Up For It (Edinburgh Fringe and Purcell Room).

Other theatre credits include: As You Like It (RSC); Outside Edge and Martin Sherman’s Messiah Hampstead); Oklahoma (NT); Lost in Yonkers (Strand Theatre); and recently Daytona (Park Theatre & Haymarket Theatre); Harvey (Birmingham Rep) and The Best Man (Playhouse Theatre).
Film credits include: Agony; Love’s Labours Lost; playing Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street, and fronting Celebrity Gogglebox. She appeared in ITV’s DNA Journey with Rula Lenska which kept her buoyant during lockdown.

She appeared in fifty-five BT adverts in the nineties – one of the first creations to ‘go viral’ She has also presented TV documentaries on style, Art Deco, memory and travel.

Radio credits include: To Hull and Back, and her self-written show Maureen and Friends on BBC Radio 4.

She was married for thirty-three years to the late writer Jack Rosenthal, appearing in three of his TV plays including the Emmy-winning The Evacuees. Her partner of fourteen years, Guido Castro, died in 2021. It was Martin Sherman who said: “You are a fortunate woman to have lost two such wonderful men”.

She paints for pleasure and has tied stained glass making, spray painting and collaging everything in sight. A simulated flight machine is he next venture into the unknown.

She has published ten books through Robson Books, some of which made it to the charts. She has two writer children, Amy and Adam, and two Grandchildren, Ava and Sacha. She was delighted to be awarded a Damehood in 2022.

Maureen is excited to be in the timely revival of Martin Sherman’s Rose at the Ambassadors Theatre.