Maureen Lipman

Olivier and Variety Club award-winning Maureen Lipman was a member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre for three years and of The Royal Shakespeare Company, and has appeared in a great many West End Productions—Messiah, Re-Joyce, Outside Edge, Oklahoma, and Glorious—the story of Florence Foster Jenkins—among them. For the last five years she has been delighting viewers as Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street, but recently took time off to star triumphantly in Martin Sherman‘s taxing one-woman play Rose at the Ambassadors Theatre. Her countless television and film credits include Up the Junction, Agony, Bar-Mitzvah Boy and The Evacuees (the latter two both written by her late husband Jack Rosenthal), Educating Rita, and The Pianist, directed by Roman Polanski. The 55 BT (“Beattie”) commercials made her a household name in the Nineties. She has written nine books of anecdotes and memoir, beginning with How Was It For You?” topping the bestseller lists in 1985, all published by Jeremy Robson at Robson Books, and her own shows Maureen and Friends for BBC Radio 4.

She was made a CBE in 2000 and a Dame in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to charity, entertainment, and the arts.