She tells Reader's Digest that at age 76, she's taking on one of her most challenging roles ever. Playwright Martin Sherman wrote the play Rose at the end of the 1990s with Maureen Lipman in mind. “But I was then in my early 50s,” she says, “too young for the role. But when director Scott Le Crass came to me last year with the suggestion that I was now the right age for the part, it turned out to be a marriage made in Hendon. We quickly eased into lockdown mode where we rehearsed either in the garden of my basement flat in Paddington or in a greenhouse in Media City in Salford, if I was up there for Coronation Street.” 

She recorded Rose for Sky Arts last year on stage at the Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester but in front of an empty auditorium. That’s all about to change. She opens at the same theatre on August 29 until September 11 and then transfers to the Park Theatre in north London from September 13 to October 16. 

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How will she get through it? “I need to sleep and I’m a very poor sleeper. I’ve got to be in the best of health and then I’ll be on top of it. I’m trying to tell myself that it will be like An Evening With… except not with Maureen but with Rose.” 

To complete this daunting task, the producers of Coronation Street have sanctioned her absence from Weatherfield’s cobbles. Since 2018, she has played Tyrone Dobbs’s grandmother, Evelyn Plummer. “She’s an appalling old boot. I really love her. They keep trying to give her a soft side which I enthusiastically resist. I like playing baddies. As Joyce Grenfell once pointed out, it’s very hard to play good people.” 

And fans of Maureen / Evelyn will be happy to know that she's just signed another year-long contract to keep playing Evelyn. “I like the steadiness of it and the fact I have to keep learning. It’s good for my brain: I’m not a crossword or Suduko person. I won't hear a word against Corrie. It's full of quite exceptional actors. But I don’t have a snob feeling about Corrie. When taxi drivers ask me what I’m doing and I tell them I’m in Coronation Street, they tend to go: ‘Aah, something will come up. I never watch it.’ And I mutter, ‘Well, I never drive a cab.’

Read the full interview here, it's quite wonderful.