Coronation Street legend getting married this weekend after suffering double tragedy

Coronation Street icon Maureen Lipman, who plays Evelyn Plummer in the long-running ITV soap, is getting married this coming Sunday, September 7, at the age of 80, having found happiness following the tragic deaths of her two previous loves. The news was revealed by her friend, This Morning star Gyles Brandreth, on the latest episode of his Rosebud podcast. "Dame Maureen Lipman, this Sunday I will be going to her wedding. She's getting married," he said. "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."

Maureen's big day comes after she suffered the death of two great loves. Her first husband, Jack, was a playwright and screenwriter for Coronation Street, writing 250 episodes of the soap. He died at the age of 71 in 2004 after losing his battle with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer. They had been married 31 years and shared two children, writers Amy and Adam Rosenthal.

She subsequently found love again with Guido Castr and the pair were together for 13 years. However in 2021, he sadly passed at the age of 84 following a battle with coronavirus, which left him "weakened". At the time she admitted that her "heart is cracking".

On an episode of Celebrity Gogglebox that same year Maureen told Gyles "it was not a good way to go". She told her friend:"It happened over a long period of sort of running down. He was not a young man, but he was an amazing man... It's just the circumstances."

The star met her husband, David Turner, in 2023 and went public with their relationship when she invited him to the National Television Awards in the autumn of that year. She described him as her "gentleman friend".

In September last year, she bit the bullet and popped the question while they were on the train - 20 years after the death of her first husband, and three years after her partner passed away.

She later explained in an article she wrote for the Spectator,they were on their way home from an event when she decided to propose after realising it was the one day of the year Jewish women can pop the question.

"Later that night, my partner David and I decided to tell our children that we were going to get married, with a combined age of 156.

"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, and asked him for his hand. To my surprise and slight panic, he gave it."

The pair decided to tell her children the happy news on September 8th - on what would have been her late husband Jack Rosenthal's birthday.