Maureen Lipman is good at the sharp reply, but The Pianist gives us a better reason to value her: the affection that survives some stiff dialogue. Familiar comic casting can make that quieter work easy to miss.
Fi1m perspective
In The Pianist (2002), Maureen Lipman and Frank Finlay keep a family conversation going while the circumstances around them grow harder to bear. As Szpilman’s parents, they give Roman Polanski’s drama a recognisable domestic scale, even when the dialogue sounds written for the audience’s benefit. We were moved by their efforts to carry on talking, because the affection makes us want to know these people beyond the information they must convey. Lipman helps us believe in the family before we have been allowed to know much about it.
Her comic timing became widely familiar through television: first the agony aunt Jane Lucas in Agony (1979–81), then Beattie in the BT advertisements from 1987. The danger of that familiarity is a quick assumption that we know exactly what she will provide. Alongside those parts sit Trish in Educating Rita (1983) and the Joyce Grenfell one-woman show Re:Joyce (1988), which she co-wrote and performed. The work has not been confined to comic mothers, even if those are the parts that have helped fix expectations of her.
Our recommendation for Educating Rita rests chiefly on Julie Walters and Michael Caine, who make Rita’s wish to learn matter despite Lewis Gilbert’s sometimes plodding direction. In The Pianist, Ronald Harwood’s screenplay creates a more specific difficulty for Lipman: the family exchanges have too much explaining to do. She and Finlay supply affection, but cannot make every prepared line sound spontaneous. We wanted longer with the family before the script put them to work telling us about their circumstances.
Playing Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street, which she joined in 2018, puts her back among the matriarchs. That is understandable casting, given her comic timing, but we would be wary of treating it as the whole of what she can do. The affection in The Pianist makes us wish for more parts that allow her time beyond the sharp reply. Start there for the quieter acting, allowing for family dialogue that is among the film’s weakest writing.
Biography
Maureen Lipman is an English actress. She was born on 10 May 1946 in Hull, Yorkshire. She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and began her career in theatre, appearing with the Royal National Theatre.
Lipman played the Mother in The Pianist (2002) and Trish in Educating Rita (1983), for which she received a BAFTA nomination. Her television roles include Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street and appearances in Doctor Who and Skins. She has also worked extensively on stage, winning a Laurence Olivier Award for See How They Run (1984). She was appointed CBE in 1999 and DBE in 2020 for services to charity, entertainment and the arts.
