Coronation Street's Maureen Lipman reveals retirement plans as she makes 80th birthday vow

TV legend Maureen Lipman will never retire and she has vowed to keep working until she loses her mind or her movement.

The 79-year-old actor is a regular on TV thanks to her role as Coronation Street’s Evelyn Plummer, and still treads the boards on a regular basis. Speaking on the 20 Questions podcast ahead of her 80th birthday next year, she said: “I will carry on, as much as I’m wanted, I’ll carry on until my brain goes - or my legs!

“You can only take what you’re offered. It’s not been a career where I’ve thought, ‘Shall I take the Bond film? Or shall I do the play The Cherry Orchard?’ I’m more likely to be asked to be in Carry On Columbus. That’s because I’m a bit light entertainment. So a lot of work is not coming my way, am I bitter? No, I’m not, I’ve always worked, I’ve worked though two pregnancies and young children, I’ve worked through good times and sad times.”

The actress plays Weatherfield matriarch Evelyn on the ITV soap and is one of the soap’s most popular characters with viewers. But she also criticised Corrie for its lack of good directors, filming time and consistent scripts, saying that working on Corrie came with a multitude of challenges. Saying she had to use her experience to make her character shine on screen, she said that a lot of the filming and writing was not up to scratch.

“One of the problems of being in a soap, for example, is because you’re doing eight or 10 scenes a day, you read it, you move it, and then you film it. Boom, boom, thank you, and have another crack at it if something has gone wrong, but on the whole that’s it. It’s almost like radio, but there’s cameras there.

“You can’t do anything. People are just talking heads. They’re standing there going, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that…’ if it’s EastEnders. Or, ‘I’ll have a word with you…’ if it’s Coronation Street. Nobody is picking their nose or scrubbing the sink down while they’re talking, or making three Martinis. It’s all just heads talking. That’s not what life is like. You’re in a bedroom somewhere and you’re talking to me, you’re listening, you’re making notes … I’m picking up my phone … It’s very complicated a human life, you never just do one thing.

“My first day on Coronation Street I took my coat off and then I put it back on again and Barbara [Knox} gently said to me, ‘We don’t do anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She went, ‘There’s no time to do anything. For me, acting is doing, so that is hard.”

Maureen said she loved being told what to do by a strong production team. “As far as directors are concerned it’s a curious egg. I would love to work with somebody who knows more than I do about what you do on stage. That happens, but not always. Particularly in television, certainly on something like Corrie, you hardly get any direction at all.”

Maureen insists one of the major challenges for the drama is that the episodes are penned by aa variety of people who write differently for Evelyn, meaning she often changes the words to make her lines work. Lipman – who was married to late Coronation Street writer Jack Rosenthal – told 20 Questions: “You can only be as good as your writer.

“So often you are making things work on television particularly. Slightly altering the words. Think about Coronation Street, which I love doing and I’m very fond of it, and I love the fact I can pop in and out. But every episode is a different writer so you basically never get, what you used to get when Jack wrote it, you would write a block of six, so the same voice, the same rhythms and you didn’t have to worry about whether the words suited your character, it was there, it was a single voice.

“A lot of the time now, in a series, you’ve got a different writer each one. You’re sort of having to fit it into your mouth like a big fur glove and make it in character. That can make you a bit unpopular if you do it too much.”

Despite Maureen’s criticisms, she has nothing but praise for the casting director Gennie Radcliffe who she says fills the soap with actors who are perfect for their parts. She said: “One of the good things about Coronation Street is that the casting is absolutely brilliant, we very rarely get a dud, they’re cast perfectly. There’s a big pool out there, a lesser casting director would get it wrong.”

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Threads.