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Dame Maureen Diane Turner is an English actress, comedian and columnist. She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and her stage work has included appearances wi…
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Dame Maureen Diane Turner (née Lipman; born 10 May 1946) is an English actress, comedian and columnist. She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and her stage work has included appearances with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Dame Maureen Diane Turner is an English actress, comedian and columnist. She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and her stage work has included appearances with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She was made a dame in the 2020 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to charity, entertainment and the arts.
Dame Maureen Diane Turner (née Lipman; born 10 May 1946) is an English actress, comedian and columnist. She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and her stage work has included appearances with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She was made a dame in the 2020 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to charity, entertainment and the arts.
Lipman has been nominated for seven Olivier Awards across categories commending acting in plays, musicals and comedy, winning in 1984 for See How They Run. On film, Lipman was BAFTA nominated for Educating Rita (1983) and has also appeared in The Wildcats of St Trinian's (1980), Carry On Columbus (1992), Solomon & Gaenor (1999) and The Pianist (2002). On television, Lipman had prominent roles in Agony (1979–1981), Smiley's People (1982), Eskimo Day (1996) and Ladies of Letters (2009–2010). Since 2018, she has starred in Coronation Street as Evelyn Plummer.
Lipman was born on 10 May 1946 in Kingston upon Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, the daughter of Maurice Julius Lipman and Zelma Pearlman. Her father was a tailor; he used to have a shop between the Ferens Art Gallery and Monument Bridge. Lipman grew up Jewish and found post-war Hull a welcoming place for the Jewish community. She lived in Northfield Road, Hull and attended Wheeler Primary School. The family later moved to The Greenway in Anlaby Park.
Lipman then attended Newland School for Girls in Hull, and in her youth became interested in performing. She performed in school productions, attended an early Beatles concert, and watched Elizabeth Taylor's Butterfield 8 fifteen times. Her first performances at home included impersonations of Alma Cogan; "a nice Jewish girl, she was big in our house", and she was encouraged into an acting career by her mother, who used to take her to the pantomime and push her onto the stage.
Lipman trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Source: Maureen Lipman (CC BY-SA)
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Lipman was a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company at the Old Vic from 1971 to 1973 and of the Royal Shakespeare Company for its 1973 Stratford season.
Lipman has continued to work in the theatre for more than fifty years, playing, among other roles, Aunt Eller in the National Theatre's Oklahoma!.
From November 2005 to April 2006 she played Florence Foster Jenkins in the Olivier Award-nominated show Glorious! at the Duchess Theatre in London's West End.
From October 2010 to February 2011, Lipman starred in a production of J.B. Priestley's When We Are Married at the Garrick Theatre. In 2012, she directed and appeared in a production of Barefoot in the Park on tour and starred in Old Money at Hampstead Theatre. In 2013, she starred in Daytona at the Park Theatre followed by a tour, and in 2014 a season at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. In 2015, she starred with James Dreyfus in Mary Chase's play Harvey at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, on tour and at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. In 2016, she starred in My Mother Said I Never Should at the St. James Theatre. In 2017, she starred with Felicity Kendal in a revival of Lettice and Lovage at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In 2018, she starred with Martin Shaw in The Best Man at the Playhouse Theatre, as well as returning to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the first time in fifty years with a one-woman show of jokes and storytelling called Up For It.
Lipman is set to appear in a special performance of Right Before I Go for World Suicide Prevention Day on 10 September 2026. Following Gerard McCarthy's withdrawal from the play over Lipman's views on the Israel–Palestine conflict, Lipman criticised the actor for being "so cowardly", claiming that McCarthy had been radicalised and described their withdrawal as "virtue-signalling".
Lipman's first television role was in The Inquisitors opposite Diana Dors; other early appearances included the sitcoms The Lovers, and Doctor at Large, and a role in The Evacuees (1975). Lipman first gained prominence on television in the situation comedy Agony (1979–81), in which she played an agony aunt with a troubled private life. In her role as Stella Craven in Smiley's People (1982), Lipman appeared with Alec Guinness.
She performed the Joyce Grenfell monologue The Committee for the first time on The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog, which was recorded 1982, and broadcast by Channel 4 in 1983.
She played the lead role in the television series All at No 20 (1986–87) and took on a range of diverse characters when starring in the series of comedy plays About Face (1989–91). She is known for playing Joyce Grenfell in the biographical show Re: Joyce!, which she co-wrote with James Roose-Evans.
In 1996 she appeared in the BBC comedy drama Eskimo Day, written by husband Jack Rosenthal and directed by Piers Haggard, about the trials and tribulations of three young would-be students as they arrive with their families at Queens' College, Cambridge, on interview day. There was a sequel, Cold Enough for Snow, in 1997.
She appeared as snooty landlady Lillian Spencer in Coronation Street for six episodes in 2002. The character was employed by Fred Elliott (John Savident) to run The Rovers Return Inn. She re-joined the cast of Coronation Street in August 2018, this time playing Evelyn Plummer, the long-lost grandmother of Tyrone Dobbs (Alan Halsall). During filiming for the show in November 2023, she was accompanied by a security guard due to a rise in antisemitic attacks in the UK.
In 2003 she appeared in Jonathan Creek in the episode "The Tailor's Dummy". Lipman played Maggie Wych in the children's television show The Fugitives, broadcast in 2005. She has narrated two television series on the subject of design, one for UKT
