Jenny Lipman, an acting tutor and director of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda) for more than 20 years, has died at the age of 77.
Over the course of her teaching career Lipman trained famous actors including Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy, Stephen Graham, Rose Leslie, and Sam Claflin, becoming known and beloved for her passion, rigour and faithful dedication to the craft.
Lipman was born into a Jewish family on October 23, 1948 in London. In 1970, she began attending the since-closed Drama Centre, where she befriended actor Simon Callow, who described the 22-year-old Lipman as being “extraordinarily beautiful, but shy, with a somewhat veiled quality, which would easily dissolve into laughter, laughing till the tears ran down her face.”
During Lipman’s training under Christopher Fettes, Yat Malmgren and John Blatchley, Callow said she revealed an unexpected genius for comedy, not least when she embodied one of her kooky characters, Ethel Flopp, a hare-brained charwoman.
After graduating from drama school, Lipman spent several years in Florence as a guide at the Uffizi and then in Rome at the Forum, where she learnt Italian and continued acting in theatrical productions.
Her subsequent career with touring companies took her to south-east Asia where she performed bedroom farces; the Middle East, and back to the UK, where she performed in Christmas shows. In the early 1980s, Lipman appeared in several television epics, from Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth to the PBS miniseries Disraeli to the sci-fi series The Day of the Triffids.
But it was on the stage where she thrived. Over the next few years when Lipman continued to act, she worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Open Space Theatre, Theatre Royal York, Liverpool Playhouse, Liverpool Everyman, Palace Theatre Watford, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Watermill Theatre Newbury and The Roundhouse in London. She appeared as Jessica to Vladek Sheybal’s Shylock in Charles Marowitz’s take on The Merchant of Venice, Briseis in John Barton’s The Greeks, and occasionally performed in Italian productions at the Teatro Stabile in Turin, putting her linguistic abilities to use. Lipman worked with theatre directors such as Terry Hands, David Thacker and Ken Campbell, as well as television and film directors such as Michael Apted, Bruce Beresford, Ken Hannam, Claude Whatham and Michael Papas.
She came to teaching in her forties, initially at Rose Bruford College, then back at her alma mater, the Drama Centre, and a number of other prestigious drama schools in London: Rada, Central School, Italia Conti, and Guildhall. Lipman taught under Peter James when she began her 23-year tenure at Lamda in 1998, where she specialised in preparing students for drama school auditions.
In his eulogy for Lipman, Callow said it was “immediately clear” that she had found her calling, and it wasn’t long before he started hearing from her former students about the “life-changing nature of her classes, about her passionate and direct approach, using the well-worn Stanislavskian exercises with great rigour”.
Lipman challenged her students to engage deeply with the inner lives of their characters, demanding, as Callow said, “that they lay their souls on the line”.
She followed her students’ work long after they left her classes, never missing a performance.
“She continued to believe to the very end the oft-repeated mantra of our teachers at the Drama Centre, Yat Malmgren, Christopher Fettes and John Blatchley, that every bad or uncommitted performance diminishes the power of the very idea of acting,” Callow said.
After leaving Lamda Lipman continued to teach privately and at Giles Foreman’s Centre for Acting in Soho. She kept up with her work enthusiastically even when, at the age of 74, she was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. It did not disrupt her devotion to her students; until almost the very end, Callow said Lipman would “crawl out of bed, enfeebled, to get to the theatres in which her students were appearing, determined not to miss a single performance of theirs”.
Lipman, who was a member of Hampstead Synagogue, died in London on January 30 of ovarian cancer.
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