Shots from the lip

Roman Polanski, director extraordinaire and holocaust survivor, has for the first and last time visited this most painful of territories with The Pianist, a stupendously powerful testimony of one man’s survival in the Warsaw ghettoes. Not the least of the film’s pleasures is the unexpected screen re-appearance of comedienne Maureen Lipman, much beloved as a veteran of British sitcom television, who plays a camp-bound Jewish mother in the film.

"It’s obviously difficult for me to view it objectively," Lipman says of the film, "but I do think it’s a masterly piece of film-making, and I’m quite surprised that it’s been reacted to as well as it has. I mean I’m pleased, of course, but I’m quite surprised because I thought ‘it doesn’t have any sentiment, it has no emotional manipulation at all, unlike every other holocaust movie – particularly Life Is Beautiful which was stupid and I didn’t like at all, it was just completely unreal. I liked Schindler’s List and without it I don’t think this film could have been made, because it opened the whole affair up to the world.

"But this is an incredibly dispassionate movie about a passionate subject," Lipman continues, "and that book (The Pianist) is written by someone who is totally numbed by his experience, and anyone other than Polanski – he doesn’t want to reproduce his own experience in the holocaust, he wants to show that there are heroes and villains in every race, and when he shouted ‘Cut! at the end of a take, the Polish extras applauded him every time.

"And I think that meant a lot to him because there is a generalised perception that the Poles were anti-Semitic and that nobody helped, and like most cliches there’s a ring of truth there, but at the same time, this guy couldn’t have survived without those good Poles, and he certainly wouldn’t be alive without the one good German, and he himself is not a hero, and he’s saved not because he’s in any way more worthy than anyone else, he’s saved because he’s an artist, which is another Polanski motif."

Did Polanski discuss his own Holocaust memories for the purpose?

"Only when it was absolutely necessary," she replies. "There was a really chilling moment, rehearsing this one scene in a hotel room, and we had to say everything as he wanted it said, every inflection, and he hears the whole thing in his head like a score."

Lipman came into the world in 1946, to Jewish parents: how much did the holocaust inform her upbringing?

"Not at all, it was never even mentioned, it was never mentionable, it was like cancer. Now my upbringing has nothing really to do with me wanting to do the film. You basically don’t get many parts at my stage of life and when you get a Roman Polanski film, you do it."

But there are people who would feel that his legal standing as a millionaire fugitive from statutory-rape charges presents a problem...

"Not at all. No. Not for one minute. Good God, if we were all prosecuted for what we did in the ’70s, luv, there wouldn’t be many of us around."

Do you feel that it’s damaged his standing?

"Read that book Easy Riders Raging Bulls. They were hot times, they were mad times, the guy’s wife was hacked up. I don’t think any artist would decide to not work with Mozart because he had bad table manners. That’s the way I look at it, I would never judge anyone, including Matthew Kelly, who’s now been nabbed for what he did in the ’70s, or what he allegedly did in the ’70s. We all did a lot of stuff in the ’70s.’

But if Kelly were proven to have been in breach of the law, does the 20-year timescale absolve the alleged crime? Nazi-hunters such as the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation have spent years arguing otherwise...

"Well I’m glad you brought that up because it’s so clear that there are degrees of crime, and you know I can remember being very young growing up watching a programme about one of those old Nazis, and I remember thinking to myself, though hardly daring to say it, ‘Oh, he’s so old, he has a cancer, poor old man, what’s the point hounding him?’ That’s because I was ignorant, I didn’t really understand what had happened, and it’s through reading and meeting survivors that I grasped the enormity of how that had affected not just me and my ancestors, but what genocide does to the next generation and the next and the next and the next, and how that rebounds through history.

"Now, to equate that in any way to the gay world of the ’70s, and the coming-out after the repression and the gay-bashing and the arresting of queens in toilets and everything, and then suddenly it’s the ’60s or the ’70s and you don’t know how old anybody is and – I don’t know the stories, if he’s done it then I’m sorry for him, and I’m sorry for the guys he did it to, but my point is that Matthew Kelly is a lovely, generous, kind man who everybody really likes, and there’s a right way of doing this and a wrong way, and it seems to me that Jonathan King is sitting in a prison cell somewhere spewing poison.

"There’s an element of ‘we are going to teach these people a lesson’ and whenever they want to do that, they use a high-profile celebrity, I remember it happening to Derek Nimmo. And all the innuendo starts about this man and that man, all this... there’s a witch-hunt, and I don’t like it.

"You remember those ignorant buggers went and stood outside a paediatrician’s house and smashed the windows? The mob mentality is something we all have to be terribly careful about, because it’s the mob mentality that allowed Hitler to get that far. We can continue to ignore history, or we can stop it in its tracks."

On the subject, how does Lipman, as a British Jew, perceive British-Jews’ attitude to Israel and the Palestinian occupation?

Lipman’s face darkens.

"This is the lesson, the survival of those Jews who came through the camps. They must have been so strong, it’s like survival of the fittest, they must have been so genetically strong that the result of that seems to be Israel. We’re all in the diaspora and in a terrible position, because we can’t speak for what it’s like to live in Israel, so all we can do is support Israel if we’re Jews, and try to redress the balance, because it’s tipped so much against the Israelis."

What has tipped against them?

"The media balance, the balance of press coverage."

Against the Israelis: are you serious?

"Oh, I’m afraid I have to go out of the room if Orla Guerin or John Pilger comes on. I can’t take the pro-Palestinian coverage. We all know that there has to be a state of some sort, but you tell me, is it going to be a democratic state with full judicial rights and equality for women?"

Possibly not, but is that reason enough to continue crushing them like cockroaches?

"What? You tell me (a tad flustered) I tell you, we could really get into this over a drink, and I... I find, the Jewish population who are marching against Israel, and signing petitions against Israel, I can hardly speak to them or of them, they make me sick. Where are all the millions and millions being poured into Palestine coming from?"

But the Israeli state is armed to the teeth with the very best of US military hardware, usually employed against ten-year-old Palestinian children throwing stones.

Lipman cuts in instantly: "Mmmm, that’s a very romantic view of it… You tell me, are you going to balance that against blowing up a bus and kids’ heads rolling down the street? Those kids with the stones are taught to hate from birth, they are taught that there is no such thing as Israel, they have no willingness to compromise. Nominally, I think there is, if they’d bloody accepted Barak’s 75% offer, there wouldn’t have been a need for Sharon. Every time they blow up another bus or disco and kill another bunch of kids, and then their families are given loads of money and protected for the rest of their life as heroes... you get Sharon."

Does Lipman support or oppose Sharon?

"Well, I think you get the leader you need at the time. As I say, if they’d accepted 75%, there wouldn’t have been a need for Sharon."

Maureen Lipman: starring in The Pianist, a hugely powerful historical movie now showing at a cinema near you. You can even decide to learn from it, if you try.