PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
The blossoming of Maureen Lipman has been a splendid thing to observe for those of her friends she left behind in the long trail from Hull to West End: Shakespeare, Alan Ayckbourn, merry witch, Kitty McShane; panto, magazine columnist.
The best bit of acting she ever did took place by courtesy of the Post Office rather than any theatre management. -
"My first part was at Watford- I played the girl in The Knack, and really got that through a huge piece of cheek. I rang a director I knew saying I had an offer from a TV company to make a documentary about a young actress setting out on her first job. I said that if he gave me the part it would be enormous publicity for the theatre.
"Anyway, he gave me a job and never asked where the TV crew was. I'd worked there months before I said, 'Did you ever wonder?' ; and he said, 'I think I saw through that one. But I also thought that with your amount of cheek, I'd give you a chance."
She married the playwright Jack Rosenthal whom she met in Manchester when she joined the Stables Theatre company and he was doing The Dustbinmen.
"I was 26 or so. I suppose cookie is an outdated word, but I would wear floor-length coats and rainbow scarves and big hats and I would generally waft around being a bit actressy. He seemed rather worldly-wise, had a sports car, and there was a Gallic weariness about him.
"I was always ringing him pretending to be old Jewish ladies trying to marry him off to their daughters, frightening the wits out of him. I got an offer to join the Old Vie and then it was a question of whether we would be able to continue the relationship at long distance. We had got to the stage where he was on the family photographs, but standing back so that my mother could cut him off if nothing came of it.
"We had been going around together for about four years. I thought it was time we settled down and got on with it, or didn't. He was reluctant to come to London. But he finally got frog-marched down by me and admitted that within half an hour, London was his home.
She once said she had been discovered more often than Lassie - “not that there has been a huge fuss of the star-is-born category. I feel like Beryl Reed in a way - someone who will always be around. I could always play older women, and often do.”
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007