Lipman lands herself in it

Thanks for the memories: Maureen Lipman with her daughter Amy, who adapted her father's memoirs for the Radio 4 programme, Jack Rosenthal's Last Act

Alison Roberts|Evening Standard

11 April 2012

It seems so unlikely, so anomalous, that Maureen Lipman, one of the nation's best-loved comic actresses, should be receiving anything so horrid as hate mail. Yet in the past few weeks, a number of "really quite nasty" letters have plopped onto her doormat.

"The people who write are on the whole quite explosive, and mostly illiterate," she says, "though some say, look, I've always admired you as an actress and I saw you in this, or that, but you know I must put you straight on blah blah."

Of course, it is Lipman's robust and very public defence of Israel during the conflict in Lebanon that has drawn such a hot-tempered response. When I meet her, at her beautiful, rambling house in north London, she has just got back from a lunch hosted by The Oldie magazine. A guest of honour, with a new book of verse to promote, she found herself debating Israeli policy throughout the meal with those seated on both sides of her. "I do wonder whether, if I was Maggie Smith, we'd be talking politics like this," she quips.

It was an appearance on the BBC's This Week show, alongside a vehemently anti-Israeli Diane Abbott, which seemed to offend most. Lipman locked horns with Abbott, and, she claims, foolishly gave in to a certain amount of deliberate provocation. A newspaper columnist herself (for The Guardian), she was roundly, in one case viciously, berated by several rival columnists for her subsequent comments on the cheapness, or otherwise, of life either side of the Israeli-Arab divide.

"I was cut off mid-flow," she says, "which is what they do on those shows so that your opinion sounds quite brutal, without any extra context." Yet she stands by the thrust of what she said on the programme. "I said life is not cheap to Israelis. That they are not the people who strap bombs to children and send them to the marketplace so that they become martyrs. But I did not say life is cheap to Muslims. Of course not. I'd have to be brain-dead to say that."

But what, in any case, is Lipman doing on late-night politics shows like these? At 60, she is first and foremost a comedienne and comic writer - not a contraversialist. "God knows," she replies. "I suppose I do most things I'm asked to do. I'm a little naïve, I will admit that. It's this soundbite culture that kills you. You start to say something but you're never allowed to finish it." She has now decided not to accept invitations to appear on Question Time. "Even the most experienced television performer, which I am, can come unstuck on a programme like that. It's not my thing, I'm out of my depth."

Lipman was born in 1946 into a Jewish family in Hull, Yorkshire. Her father was a tailor and her mother, Zelma, an ambitious woman who urged Lipman to act. Although her life and family are firmly in the UK, she has visited Israel on several occasions and written about the country in the Jewish Chronicle.

On the subject of Israel her feelings are so strong, so angry, that Lipman almost cannot help herself. Her comments, in general, strongly echo those of the crossparty panel of MPs who last week warned of rising anti-Semitism in the wake of the Lebanon war. She is convinced, moreover, that the BBC's reporting of the conflict was biased in favour of Hizbollah. "I just want the debate to be fair; a level playing field. If you're going to show mutilated children and carnage in a small part of Lebanon, don't just show a small dimple in a wall on the other side. A thousand rockets have gone into Israel. People have been injured and disabled and blown up.

"It's endemic in the media. It's this Leftie intellectualising attitude: let's hate the Jews one way or another - I'm not saying the BBC hates the Jews, of course not, but the reportage is biased. It really is".

And so Lipman, having just finished a six-month run at The Duchess in the hugely successful comedy Glorious!, whose appearance as an evil alien in Dr Who was a highlight of the recent series, is suddenly much in demand as a contentious commentator on themost serious of subjects. I wonder what her late husband, the playwright Jack Rosenthal, would have made of all the fuss?

HE'D have told me to shut up," she says immediately. And would you have done? "No, probably not - Jack's politics were in his work. The theme of his life, and his work, lay in giving the underdog a voice. He was much subtler than me. He'd never have dreamed of going on the politics programmes."

Lipman met Rosenthal in a Manchester pub in 1969 when he was working on Coronation Street, and the couple married four years later in a synagogue. They had two children together - 32-year-old playwright Amy and Adam, 29.

Rosenthal's memory, if not his likely advice, still dominates Lipman's life. Upstairs hangs the old grey and white herringbone overcoat he wore, at the end of his life, to each gruelling hospital visit, and on the table lies a copy of the unfinished autobiography, stuffed with bookmarks, which she recently turned into a series for Radio 4.

Best known for the films Bar Mitzvah Boy, P'Tang, Yang, Kipperbang and Eskimo Day, Rosenthal died in 2004, at the age of 72, after a protracted battle with the blood cancer myeloma. It is to the charity International
Myeloma Foundation UK that Lipman has dedicated the proceeds of her latest book - a slim volume of nonsense verse written mainly as a means of distracting herself from the horror of his illness.

Lipman composed the poems - she calls them anthropoemorphic; they all feature animals doing, and being, daft things - on the long car journeys from home in Muswell Hill to the hospitals in Sutton and Wimbledon where Rosenthal was treated, and, later, during restless nights alone in the bedroom they shared. "Over the course of two years, I wrote 50 poems, which is a lot of sleepless nights," she says, sounding suddenly weary and terribly sad. "It's what comics do, in that kind of situation - write funny verses.

"I suppose I'm doing the best I can to keep his memory alive, to keep myself chuckling and busy and to show other people that you can sublimate grief. I've not had any therapy, though I recognise that I may need to. A lot of my friends have had endless weekly sessions with Cruse or with the North London Hospice, which is where Jack was eventually. But I haven't had a plan like that. I've just gone along with whatever I thought might divert me."

For more than a year after Jack's death, Lipman, while continuing her stage career, did not write creatively at all. Then, wanting to pay tribute publicly to his life, she decided to finish his autobiography, which stopped at 1989. Rosenthal was employing an unorthodox but perfectly appropriate autobiographical form, and writing his life as a screenplay. For a while Lipman tried to copy his style, but in the end resorted to prose: the result is a funny, emotionally intimate portrait of a decent family-centred and football-obsessed man. She found it agonising to write, and almost as painful to hear on the radio later.

"Oh, that was hard," she says. "So very hard. I hadn't taken notes, or kept a diary, so I had to dredge it all up from my memory and that, remembering a life intensely - it was just so so difficult."

But now it is done. And after 23 years in the same large house in Muswell Hill ("I've seen five couples come and go next door"), Lipman is ready to move on. She is slowly sifting through her papers and putting Rosenthal's into archive. ITV, she tells me, is bringing out a DVD of 17 of Rosenthal's works, though the BBC, shamefully, and to Lipman's great annoyance, has yet to agree to make its collection similarly available.

She would like to move closer to town, for access to the parts of London she loves - the Tate galleries, the West End, the homes of friends. The underlying melancholy is temporarily quashed, she says, with tango lessons and art classes; it turns out that she is really rather good at painting and "can't wait to go [to class] again". Her basenji puppy Diva, meanwhile, "gets me out of bed in the mornings".

"The rest of the year is about moving for me. I think I have done all I can here - the big book, the little book to raise money.

"Now I feel ready to pack up. To take his overcoat out of the wardrobe and move on. But I'll be taking him with me, too, of course. He'll still be there."

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