The soap icon who is a favourite on Coronation Street is getting ready to marry her fiance this weekend after popping the question to him while on a train last year
A Coronation Street legend is getting married in just a matter of days after proposing to her fiance last year.
Dame Maureen Lipman, who has played Evelyn Plummer in the ITV soap since 2018, is walking down the aisle this weekend. It was last September when she proposed to her business consultant boyfriend David Turner, also 79, on a train.
Her Gogglebox co-star and dear friend Gyles Brandreth has revealed her wedding is taking place this weekend. “Dame Maureen Lipman, this Sunday I will be going to her wedding. She’s getting married,” he revealed.
“She’s getting married in the morning! I think it’s actually the afternoon. I’ll be there. Isn’t it fantastic? To get married in your 80th year is fantastic,” he said on his Rosebud podcast.
The actress shared her engagement last year – as well as her rather unusual proposal. She wrote in the Spectator: “Later that night my partner David and I decided to tell our children that, with a combined age of 156, we are going to get married.
“In truth I had been rather against the ‘M’ word, but on a train coming back from Edinburgh he mentioned that it was the minor festival of Tu B’Av – a day when a Jewish woman can ask a man to marry her.
“Unable to resist the gag, I slid under the table separating us onto one knee and asked him for his hand. To my surprise and slight panic, he gave it.”
Maureen was previously married to TV writer Jack Rosenthal for 30 years until he died in 2004. They share their daughter Amy, 50, and son Adam, 48.
Her soon-to-be-husband David also has three children from a previous relationship. The actress revealed their children were all welcoming of the news – and perhaps a little surprised.
“All reactions were warm, and all were individual,” she said at the time. “One child said that he needed time ‘to process it’. We broke the news to another as he slid leaves into a new dining table, transforming the scene into a Jack Rosenthal play – one with, I like to think, a happy ending.”
Maureen first went public with David in 2023 when she confirmed she was bringing a “gentleman friend” to that year’s National Television Awards. She told the Sunday Express: “I’m going with my gentleman friend David.”
They also stepped out together at the Oldie of the Year Awards in 2023. She confirmed: “That’s my significant other>”
Maureen has gushed about finding love once again later in life, admitting: “It’s a gift for all concerned. It’s a gift and he’s been very nice. I’ve met some nice men in my life, some really interesting men, and we will see where it goes.”
The soap star dated Italian businessman Guido Castro for 13 years before he passed in 2021. “He got Covid – it wasn’t Covid that killed him but it weakened him terribly,” she said.
“We don’t know how he got it or when or if he had it when he got the vaccine. I said to Guido, ‘It’s time to go. You’ve got to let go’. And I think for once in his life he actually did what I told him.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
