CORONATION STREET'S MAUREEN LIPMAN LEAVING ITV SOAP - AND WON'T RETURN UNTIL 2025
Coronation Street's Dame Maureen Lipman, who plays Evelyn Plummer, has announced she'll be taking a well-deserved break from the show and won't return until 2025.
The veteran actress is set to dazzle audiences in Richmond Theatre's pantomime, Beauty and the Beast, this coming December through January, before taking her leave from the ITV soap. A Corrie spokesperson confirmed the star's temporary departure.
They said: "Dame Maureen is taking a sabbatical from Coronation Street towards the end of the year. We look forward to seeing her back on the cobbles in 2025."
Maureen herself quipped about her upcoming panto role: "They asked me to do panto and I said 'Oh no I can't'... They said 'OH YES YOU CAN! '". At 77, Maureen will join forces with comedian Pete Firman in the pantomime, following her candid remarks about the soap's direction.
On the Beyond the Title podcast, she criticised the current storylines, saying: "We've come to a point in Corrie now where people are getting murdered in knicker factories. We're having domestic abuse. Anything that ticks the box of social problems in the 21st century is going to be in your local soap.
"Whereas back then you had the freedom to put Martha [Longhurst], Minnie [Caldwell] and Ena [Sharples] in the snug and have a conversation about Ben-Hur. It's never been political but I always like it when the women sit down and go, 'Ooh, Donald Trump, ain't his hair shocking.'
"All those wonderful expressions that your parents come out with, like my mother saying, 'Ooh, doesn't a black skirt cover a multitude of sins.' People talk like that, and we recognise it as true." Corrie fans brace yourselves for more heartache as Peter Ash is set to say his final farewell to the cobbles, leaving his role as Paul Foreman.
In an emotional storyline, Paul will tragically succumb to motor neurone disease this summer. Back in November 2023, a nurse gave Paul a grim prognosis of six months to a year left. Now seven months on, his health has sharply declined.
He can no longer eat without a feeding tube, and after a nasty tumble from his stairlift, he's pretty much housebound. Last year, Paul had what was dubbed his "last Christmas " with loved ones, and it's expected that his departure from the show will happen before the leaves start to fall in 2024.
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2024-07-04T15:04:14Z dg43tfdfdgfd