Famed Coronation Street actress Dame Maureen Lipman has become engaged.
The 78-year-old actress said she had always been “against the M word (marriage)” but that one day, while riding a train, she made the decision to ask her partner David Turner to marry him. Following the soap opera star and Queen Camilla’s attendance at a glamorous function, the proposal was made.
Maureen previously mourned the death of her former partner, retired computer expert Guido Castro, when he tragically died in January 2021. It wasn’t her first heartbreaking loss as she had been married to Corrie writer Jack Rosenthal from 1974 until his death from cancer in 2004.
Dame Maureen revealed her engagement to David was a spur-of-the-moment decision while they were both travelling home on the train from the launch of the Queen’s son, Tom Parker-Bowles’ latest cooking book. She wrote: “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.
She explained she decided to change her mind about marriage as it was the festival of Tu B’Av a Jewish festival, where a woman can ask a man to marry her. Writing for The Spectator, the Evelyn Plummer actress added: “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.” David and Maureen broke the news to her children on September 8, a special day as it was the birthday of her her late husband Jack.
Dame Maureen previously opened up about grieving Jack, who died aged 72, with his cause of death being ruled as multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. She told The People: “I have had a wonderful life, I have had my losses, of course.
“I lost my husband far too young to myeloma.” Four years after losing her husband, she found love again in Gudio, but sadly he died in 2021 after contracting the coronavirus which “weakened him terribly”.
Gudio had reportedly been in a respite home having previously been diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s disease. She explained that she had no idea when he contracted the virus, adding that it could have been when he received the vaccination.
She told the Daily Mail: “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.” Maureen added: “my heart is cracking.”
