Maureen Lipman married her partner, businessman David Turner, this weekend in a ceremony that was briefly interrupted when a nationwide government emergency alert sounded on mobile phones at about 3 a.m.
The Coronation Street actress, 79, who proposed to Turner during a train journey last year, wore a blush-pink coat dress with a cream fascinator and mid-heel shoes; Turner, also 79, wore a dark grey suit, a bow tie and a traditional kippah. Guests later relaxed as the couple removed jackets and bow ties and continued the celebrations.
On Monday, broadcaster and friend Gyles Brandreth said on ITV's This Morning that the government alert had sounded “under quite exciting circumstances.” Brandreth told viewers that, he was told, a rabbi attending the ceremony had written to the prime minister about the wedding, and joked that the response was that sirens would be sounded across the country. On his podcast Rosebud last week, Brandreth had also said he would attend the wedding and announced the date.
Lip announced her engagement in a Spectator column last year, recounting how she had asked Turner to marry her on a return train journey from Edinburgh on Tu B'Av, a minor Jewish festival when, she wrote, a woman may ask a man to marry her. She wrote: "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." She said their children received the news with "warm" and varying reactions.
Lipman was married to television writer Jack Rosenthal for 30 years until his death in 2004. The couple had two children, Amy and Adam. Turner has three children from a previous relationship.
Lipman, who plays Evelyn Plummer on Coronation Street, first mentioned Turner publicly in 2023 when she said she would be taking a "gentleman friend" to that year's National Television Awards. Friends and colleagues celebrated the marriage on social media and in broadcast interviews following news of the weekend ceremony.
Officials have said the government emergency alert system is intended to reach mobile phones in an emergency; the alert that sounded during the wedding reached many handsets shortly after 3 a.m. The cause of that particular alert was not given at the ceremony, and organisers and guests described it as an unexpected interruption to an otherwise planned celebration.
The wedding adds to Lipman's public life as a long-serving television and stage actress and as a columnist. In recent years she has frequently appeared on television discussion programmes and on the reality show Gogglebox with friends and colleagues. She did not immediately comment publicly after the ceremony.