Star cries every day

Apr 12 2005 By The Journal

Maureen Lipman says she cries "900 times a day" since the death of her husband, playwright Jack Rosenthal.

The stage and screen actress has been writing the last chapter of her late husband's autobiography. Mr Rosenthal wrote six out of seven decades before he died last year at the age of 72, from bone marrow cancer.

Ms Lipman, most famous for her role as Beattie in the BT adverts, has now written the last decade.

The 58-year-old, who wept during an interview with the Radio Times, told the magazine: "I do this 900 times a day. I've always been on the verge of tears, even when I had absolutely nothing to cry about, I was the same.

"It's just that right now, I find kindness very hard to bear."

Ms Lipman has thrown herself into work since the loss of her beloved husband of 31 years.

"You just work 12 hours a day and you don't have time to think - it's a wonderful distraction," she said.

"But whether you're just putting off the day when you just sit howling at the moon to a later date, I don't know."

Jack Rosenthal was a Coronation Street scriptwriter in the Sixties, before he went on to write a series of award-winning TV plays in the Seventies, including The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy. He also created and wrote London's Burning. In 2003, his wife appeared in Coronation Street as the hugely popular Lillian Spencer, the snooty stand-in manageress of the Rovers Return. But Ms Lipman said the plotlines of Coronation Street were now ludicrous, and that drama had been ruined by reality TV.