Maureen Lipman

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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.

1 Work
2 Awards and nominations
3 Quotes
4 Political criticism
5 Other appearances
6 References
7 Select filmography
8 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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" ^[1] 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." ^[2] 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 ^[3].

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

...

There is rarely any film of rockets being fired into Israel, nor any mention of the damage, nor of the 250,000 refugees who have fled to the centre of Israel, nor of rockets targeting Israel every day since it withdrew from Gaza, nor the damage done by 100 Hizbollah rockets a day...

More people are being killed in São Paulo, Somalia and Darfur than in this conflict. Where is the coverage? It is as if the Iraq war has completely stopped while this blanket coverage in Lebanon goes on and on and on... I sometimes think Israel should ban the press as Zimbabwe has. They are a democracy, though, and behave accordingly...

I respect freedom of speech, but I’m contemptuous of the 300 signatories [to the anti-Invasion Times advert and the Independent letter]". To English, assimilated, sometimes self-despising Jews such as Gerald Kaufman and Harold Pinter, I say: where are you going to go when the shit hits the fan? It doesn’t matter if you stand in Parliament or marry into the aristocracy, there will be no Israel to receive you, as they have received so many before. Why didn’t they put their ad in an Israeli newspaper? Because it is more important to impress their fellow Englishmen than to effect change in the situation. Where are their signatures against Burma, Nepal, Tibet, and Zimbabwe? ...^[4]