Maureen Lipman is to be made a dame in the Queen’s Birthday Honours which are due to be formally announced in the early hours of Saturday morning after being delayed from June. 

The West London Synagogue member, 74, who was made a CBE 21 years ago, has enjoyed a 50-year career on the stage, TV and film and became one of the most famous characters in advertising as Beattie, the Jewish grandmother, in ads for BT. 

Her film work includes Up the Junction, Educating Rita and The Pianist, while she starred in as an agony aunt in the TV sitcom Agony and recently returned to Coronation Street. 

Her one-woman tribute to the comedienne Joyce Grenfell was widely acclaimed and last month she appeared as a Holocaust survivor in an online version of Martin Sherman’s Rose. 

An outspoken opponent of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, she made a video last year in which she reprised her role as Beattie and derided him as having an “ology in extremism”.