Dame Maureen Lipman: ‘I was afraid of being forgotten’
Panto was my chance to perform somewhere other than on the sideboard as a child. I’d be on the edge of my seat when they said, “Are there any little children in the audience?”
I still have a school exercise book where I wrote what I wanted to be when I grew up. It went: a) air hostess b) dress designer and c) actress. But as soon as everybody started applying for university, I’d done the musical festivals and elocution lessons and, in 1965, Lamda accepted me.
My parents taught us honesty, the power of loyalty and they kept us pretty much in the Jewish faith, although my brother managed to leap out. I am what I am both because of those two people and because I rebelled against them.
Education was important because my parents were second-generation refugees. My father’s grandfather came from Russia, my mother’s from Poland. That generation was grateful to be taken in by this country and have a job of any kind. Even if they’d studied philosophy, they became street traders and put their heads down so their children could be educated.
My late husband [Jack Rosenthal] and I found it almost impossible to row. We both came from families where plates were thrown. Although sometimes I’d stage a row just to keep things frisky.
Women of my generation are the luckiest there’s probably ever been. We got everything, didn’t we? Milk, cod liver oil, rock’n’roll, the pill, no tuition fees. I was paid for by Hull Council. Even my lodgings were contributed to. What a world we had then. In retrospect, prime minister Harold Macmillan was right when he said, “We’ve never had it so good.”
I was very keen to become a mum at 25. I felt slightly on the shelf and was anxious to get pregnant. Then when I did, it was the most natural thing to walk about with my head getting smaller and my body getting bigger. I was very happy to be a mother, twice over, but I went back to work too soon, because I was afraid of being forgotten.
Life is trying to teach me to stop worrying about the bags under my eyes and concentrate on someone else. David [Turner, her fiancé] has 9,000 cousins, I’ve got four, so heaven knows how we’ll manage to actually have a wedding. We may just be engaged for as long as we’ve got.
If they taught empathy at school, we’d know what to do when we lost someone. If you’ve got a lot of empathy, you’re probably quite a good actor but it also lumbers you with feeling things too deeply.
What I know about love could be written on the side of a Smartie. You just want somebody who gets you and the rest is biology. When you get it, you know.
Beauty & the Beast is at Richmond Theatre, 7 December to 5 January (atgtickets.com)
