My thoughts on Helen Mirren’s casting

On Monday, I had a whinge-walk with Lizzie, my friend of 47 years. We met at breathing classes for our first babies and we gave birth on the same day in the now defunct Avenue Clinic in St John’s Wood. Our children grew up joined at the hip. Today my daughter Amy is a playwright in NW3 and Lizzie’s is a Buddhist monk in Nepal. Amy is with me at least twice a week, though her mother’s ability to make off-the-cuff remarks which generate front-page headlines makes her wish she was the one in a Nepalese monastery. I faced my daughter’s embarrassment and near cultural cancellation last week after I commented on the casting of Helen Mirren as Golda Meir. The papers rather gleefully framed it along the lines of ‘Lipman objects to Dame Helen playing Golda!’. My comments — I am a publicist’s dream — were part of a hasty response to a telephoned questionnaire about ‘life-experience casting’. Should an actor be required to have scoliosis and a history of infanticide to play Richard III? — that sort of thing. I said that I thought actors should be free to play across the varied range of humanity but if the character’s sex, gender, race or creed drove the plot then, yes, I do believe minorities should be prioritised. I said that Helen is a marvellous actress and very sexy (which, surprisingly, Golda was), but I may have mused aloud whether Bette Midler, Tracey Ullman, Jennifer Connelly, etc, had ever been considered. My musings proved unamusing.

Dame Esther Rantzen wrote a less than comradely letter to the Times about my remarks, pointing out that Joyce Grenfell, whom I had played, was a Christian Scientist and I am not. So there! David Baddiel, on the other hand, made the point to the World at One that although there have been loud outcries about Javier Bardem being a Spaniard, not a Cuban, in Being the Ricardos, or over Eddie Redmayne not being disabled enough to play Stephen Hawking, or over the frequency in which heterosexual actors are cast in gay roles, there had not been a similar outcry about the casting of the prime minister of the first Jewish State.