Maureen Lipman is going to need a longer hallway.
The thoroughfare that winds from the front door of her Paddington apartment is also a gallery of posters and pictures from a life of theatre, film and family. It is hard to see where she will fit the poster for her latest appearance in the West End.
To the right hangs a photograph of Lipman sitting and smiling with husband Jack Rosenthal and their small children, Adam and Amy. It must have been taken in the mid-'70s, around the time when Rosenthal was writing Bar Mitzvah Boy, one of many award-winning plays he wrote for the BBC, and which at last the corporation has decided to release on DVD, though only after some arm-twisting from his widow. Cancer killed Rosenthal in 2004.
To the left is a multi-coloured promo poster from Lipman's 1968 breakthrough film, Zycie W Battersea, which also launched the careers of Suzy Kendall, Susan George and Dennis Waterman. The poster is for the Polish version of the film. The English version would have said Up the Junction.
The words "Hello!" and "Coffee?" breeze down the hallway and I follow them led by the friendly Natalie, Lipman's PA, past more framed posters from countless stage shows in which Lipman has starred - including her triumphant Joyce Grenfell show Re: Joyce! - to the kitchen where I am greeted by the sniffing Diva.
Diva is the dog. And very friendly she is too, as is her owner who pours the coffee and admits to being a little on edge after last night's out-of-town performance of J B Priestley's 1908-set comedy, When We Are Married. There is no crisis. Just the normal stress of knocking a show into good enough shape to bring into the West End where it is now.
Lipman plays Clara Soppitt, the battle-axe wife of one of three couples who, on their 25th anniversary, discover their marriage is not as respectable as they thought. It is set in Yorkshire, not a million miles away from the 64-year-old actress's hometown
of Hull.
"I tell you why I'm doing it," she says. "It's a well-made play, it doesn't require re-writes and because I'm part of a company [the cast also includes Roy Hudd, Sam Kelly, Michele Dotrice and David Horovitch] which means I don't have the responsibility of the lead or all the publicity. Oh, and because it was one of seven parts I was offered on the same day. That hasn't happened in 43 years. I had to take one them."
In those 43 years there could hardly have been busier time than now. The West End play coincides with the publication of her latest memoir, I Must Collect Myself, and the new TV series of Ladies of Letters, the epistolary comedy in which Lipman plays the sherry-quaffing Irene
opposite Anne Reid's gin-glugging Vera.
"At 64 you may well be at the end of your career", says Lipman. "But it's not like that now. There are people I know who are really sprightly and have stuff injected into their faces to make them look like someone I don't recognise."
The sound of tinkling piano keys strike up. It is the ring-tone from Lipman's mobile and there follows some serious talk about
a clearly important appointment that must not be missed. I think I hear the word "die" and I am wishing I had not. Lipman hangs up and reveals that she has a big decision to make. I brace myself for a question about health, but the issue is one of hair. To dye or not to dye?
"It's a very big dilemma," she says. "I see Julia Walters has done it, and Jo Brand. It's a big moment for
a woman."
For an actress, it is an even bigger moment. It is not just
a question of the age you look and the way you feel, but of the roles you get offered too. Some of those roles could be of Lipman's own creation. Woven into I Must Collect Myself, are 20 monologues. As easily as donning a coat, Lipman slips into the voice of one of her characters, Sandi, the Aussie mammographer who handles patients with the finesse of a lumberjack. Sandi and some of the others will appear with Lipman at one of the National Theatre's Platform events this December. There is also the possibility of a return to Joyce Grenfell with a show called Mrs Grenfell and Miss Ruth, based on the relationship and writings between Grenfell and her American actress cousin, Ruth Draper.
And there is a long-harboured ambition to direct Neil Simon's classic comedy, Barefoot in the Park. Lipman would cast herself as the mother of the newly-wed Corrie. So much for avoiding the responsibility of being the lead.
"Jack always said it was the perfect play," says Lipman of Barefoot. "I'm going to suggest it to [producer] Nica Burns. We'll see."
Elsewhere, at the Menier Chocolate
Factory, there are plans to revive Smash!, the show that Rosenthal wrote in response to the problems he encountered putting on the stage version of Bar Mitzvah Boy.
A conversation with Lipman is always likely to turn to Rosenthal. There is, though, now another man in her life. His name is Guido and he has nothing to do with showbusiness. "Which is brilliant," she says.
"What to say?" she goes on. "My consort is
a delightful man, a true and proper gentleman. It's very fortunate to have had two soul mates in one lifetime."
She tells a strangely magical story about how she and Guido first met, at a synagogue function in the presence of two female friends, both of whom remember him, as does Lipman, as
a silvery-haired chivalrous man with no beard who kissed her hand. When Lipman met him for the second time he was bald, had a beard and denied ever kissing a woman's hand. There is no moral to this story, except perhaps that supernatural romantic forces guided her and Guido together, or as Lipman puts it: "Shakespeare squeezed potion into the eyes of three menopausal women".
"No one will replace Jack," she says as we walk with Diva back through the corridor of fame with its posters and film stills. The biggest of these is for The Pianist, Roman Polanski's Oscar-winning movie about the Polish-Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman and how he survived the horrors of Warsaw during the war.
The poster features a haunted-looking Lipman, Adrien Brody and Frank Finlay among others. Earlier Lipman had told me how, when a Polish builder was doing some work in the flat, she pointed at her picture in the poster and then at herself and said "Me". He looked at the poster, then at Lipman and said "No," and walked off.
"But," continues Lipman as we reach the front door, "I'm very happy - as happy as I could be without Jack."
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