Maureen Lipman
It drives me batty that there isn't more equality in my business.Collection: Equality
Yes, maybe we do get thrown on to the scrapheap after a certain age, but that's fair enough, isn't it? The same thing happens to a leaf on a tree.Collection: Age
My Dad was a tailor and he would give my mother housekeeping money each week and call it her 'wages.'Collection: Dad
I drink hot water with lemon juice, a few drops of cider vinegar, a pinch of cayenne and turmeric, and a little maple syrup.
While filming 'The Pianist' I visited Auschwitz. Nothing prepared me for it.
Cancel culture, this cancelling, this punishment, it's everywhere. Punishment. An eye for an eye. 'You said that, therefore you must never work again.' Sooner or later, the cancellers will win.
I've often unwittingly done the wrong thing; most things you mess up in life you do through nerves.
I've always found it very hard to play the pupil game, as I call it. The one where the middle-aged actress puts her hand up and says to the director, 'Please sir, is it all right if I move over here?'
I'm full of ideas and general crackling chemistry and I can read the 'score' of a comedy as though it's a musical score.
People tell me I have good skin, which is hilarious - it doesn't matter in our business because you can cover it up.
I haven't done any elective surgery. I've nothing against it, although I would not touch Botox, because I know an actress who almost died when it went into a nerve instead of the skin.
When make-up girls say, 'You've such lovely skin' I always take the compliment, but I also flash straight back to my mother saying to my brother, 'Why don't you take Eva out? She's got lovely skin.' And my brother thinking that skin was the least important factor in deciding whether or not he took Eva out.
I have to look at myself in the mirror when I'm doing a play. I see what needs to be done, and I set about it. It's like cooking: it's a random experience that sometimes works out better than others, but never falls below a certain level. My face is different every day - if I've slept, then perhaps I don't have to do so much work on the bags.
A lot of us, it's very hard to distinguish between wanting a job and wanting to show off. I don't know the difference, I never have.
I'd have to be stark raving mad to be a supporter of Boris Johnson. And I'm not.
I was a Labour luvvie, with Blair. I wasn't really a party member.
People in power need advisers.
It's a bit like laughter in church, something has to be forbidden to make you really laugh, to make you really belly laugh. It's when you shouldn't be laughing. And so, therefore, all the things that are being cancelled out are, I'm afraid, the things that have always made people laugh.
I am judgmental.
I inadvertently lobbed a boiled potato across the room at a palace lunch.
I woke up too soon from an operation, unanaesthetised but unable to speak, and thought I was going to die from the pain.
Traffic-calming areas work because they assume courtesy, not bad manners.
Though Maggie Smith and Judi Dench have done all right, there's not a lot of drama work out there for older actresses. And you have to understand that every older actress still thinks that she's 34. Look at Joan Collins.
When I was 71, I did panto in Richmond, flashing my legs and thinking nothing of it. So I'll keep working for as long as I've got my health.
I'm not looking at anyone on television and thinking: why do I never get those parts?
I know there's a lot of misery out there, but I feel content.
Radio 4 goes on the minute I wake up.
It used to be that I couldn't go into a restaurant without someone making phone noises at me. I'm sure when I die it'll be the headline - 'Lipman Cut Off!' or 'Receiver Is Finally Put Down On Jewish Comedienne.'
As humans we need to bond and we need ritual - and that's what catchphrases represent.
I always feel vaguely sordid after an evening in front of the TV, but when you're watching advance copies of movies in order to vote by email for the Bafta awards, you can actually excuse your shirking indolence on the grounds that your vote may turn out to be the casting one.
Tragedy is turning out films like 'Match Point.'
Any day now, the word ubiquitous will permanently prefix my name.
There was a programme in the Channel 4 'Dispatches' series called 'Burma's Secret War' that chilled me to the marrow. This is about as uncivil as a civil war can be.
For anyone who has heard recordings of Florence Foster Jenkins' performances in the 1930s and 1940s, she's always been the greatest diva - the one they called 'the diva of din,' 'the first lady of the sliding scale,' and 'the queen of camp.' Although she's not really camp, she's just totally sincere.
Florence Foster Jenkins was born in Pennsylvania in 1868 and left home because her father refused to allow her to fulfil her ambition to sing in public. Now, many might say that Pop Jenkins had it completely right and the daughter had it wrong, but those who we think are losers are often winners and vice-versa.
On all these Pop Idol-style programmes, the 'experts' on the panel are always saying things like: 'Follow your dream,' and you reach for the sick bag.
My mother, Zelma, was an influence on my career. When I was six or seven I started singing, imitating people like Eartha Kitt, and putting on my own Sunday Night at the London Palladium. My mother encouraged me to perform for her friends.
I adored my father because he was dry and witty and funny. He would stand in the door of his shop greeting everybody and chatting to them as they went past.
My mother ran the home, but if we did anything naughty she would say 'Wait till your father gets home.'
My father adored my mother - she was very beautiful - but they were not fantastically compatible.
I started out as a mimic doing Bruce Forsyth and Alma Cogan when I was six. It's useful because it means you have a decent ear for accents and timing.
I say yes when I mean no. I've done it all my life.
I love my Jewishness.
I'm scared of Alzheimer's. All my father's family have terrible memories.
Members of the public always want to know how we learn our lines, as though there was some mystery to the process. There isn't. You just slog through it exactly as you did with the dates of the English kings, covering up your cues with a shopping list.
Like everything, save poaching eggs and flamenco, learning gets harder as one gets older.
I'm well on my way to becoming one of those grumpy old actresses with faces like crocodile handbags who live out their days surrounded only by wagging tails and wet noses, believing mankind to be warmongering and feckless.
There are experts in every field without a clue of what they are supposed to be good at. Plumbers and doctors and car mechanics and, I suppose, actors and certainly directors.
I have decent hair; it's one of the few things I like about me.
It is an acknowledged fact that a woman who has visited Newcastle, Malvern, Glasgow and Bath in the space of four weeks must be in awe of stone masons. Never was there seen such magnificent perspective, such carved and curlicued splendour. All this, plus surrounding hills and shopping.