Lipman and Bernstein. Do you believe in this combination?

I may have mentioned this before… I’m at that age when I may have mentioned everything before… but I watched the great Leonard Bernstein conducting and playing piano for Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1976 and was utterly transported. I recommend you find it on YouTube, settle into your comfiest sofa and join me there.

It is the ultimate immigrant music and he, Gershwin, wrote it in three weeks having read in the newspaper, while in a bar in New York, that it was to be premiered at the Aeolian Hall as part of the Abraham Lincoln birthday celebrations.

It was news to him and he had several other projects going on including a musical, Sweet Little Devil, which was set to open in the same week. He came up with the main theme on a train to Boston and it premiered with the Paul Whiteman Band before an audience including Fritz Kleisner, Leopold Stokowski and Sergei Rachmaninov.

It was a triumph of jazz and classical fusion and remains so 49 years later. The desert island of disc fame is littered with copies of it. Sometimes, I do believe, a work of art is just there, waiting to be discovered, painted, composed or sculpted by the right person at the right time.

Jack, my late husband, and I once drove around the Ring of Beara, listening to its peaks and troughs, perfectly reflecting every bend in that beautiful scenic road. It was, a beautiful, tear-jerking trip.

Bernstein once came to see a show I was appearing in at the Watford Palace Theatre. It was 1986, so I was 30 and unstoppable. It was exciting for the cast, knowing he was out front, but thankfully, they kept it from me. The show was a musical called Wonderful Town that he completed in 1953 with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

He had written it, needing a quick buck, after the birth of his first daughter Jamie, who 21 years later accompanied him to see our version of his show. The musical was based on a play called My Sister Eileen and concerned two sisters from the sticks arriving in New York. One was a blonde beauty and the other was me.

Bernstein was fabulous in tan leather trousers and a peacock blue macramé sweater. He took my face in his hands and said something that was so memorable that I must have momentarily passed out, because I cannot remember a word of it. We transferred to the Queen’s Theatre (now the Gielgud) with the help of the maverick producer Dan Crawford, who placed a box advert in the Financial Times that read: “Lipman and Bernstein. Do you believe in this combination?”

It was embarrassing to sell us like a firm of button makers and press-stud providers, but it must have brought in a few quid because Bill Kenwright came on board and we ran for six months. One Saturday night I was so overcome with the joy of being in such a perfect gem of a show that I practically levitated at the curtain call. Heart thudding as I bowed, I thought airily: “This is why I came into the business! This is why I trained so hard and knocked myself out at every performance… I am the luckiest woman on Earth to be here and alive at this moment in time!”

And as I floated to the wings, in a sea of self-esteem, my leading man held the blackout-curtain for me and asked, prosaically: “How much do you pay in car insurance?’’

I learnt a lesson that night. Don’t assume others are thinking as you are.

Still, I stayed on my cloud till the last show and fuelled by beaujolais and bouquets on the last night, I went home and sat down to write my experience in a letter that I posted to the great Bernstein that very night. It was, to say the least, extremely effusive.

Fade out until 2015 when I read in the Ham & High that Jamie Bernstein, now in her sixties, was giving a talk about the book of her father’s prolific letters that she had curated and had recently been published. I went along to what was then Ivy House in Hampstead and listened to her thrilling memories as she read from the book. Afterwards, I waited in line to have her sign my copy and, somewhat shyly, reminded her of our previous encounter. She looked up wide-eyed. “Marine?” she cried (Americans always pronounce it thus). “Marine? Oh, my lord, of course I remember! And….” she added, “You have a letter in the book.” He had kept my enthused burblings for three decades. Leonard Bernstein. I felt like Spike Milligan in Adolf Hitler, My Part in his Downfall.

I did not get through the Bradley Cooper biopic, I’m afraid. I am uninterested in Bernstein’s sexual proclivity, or his marriage to a long-suffering wife. He was, and I don’t use the word lightly, a genius. A passionate polymorph, a wild man of music, a composer, a teacher, a concert pianist, a conductor and a deeply committed Jew and I would have married him in a quaver. As for the prosthetic nose, well, don’t get me started. Bernstein was stocky, with a big, beautiful, leonine head and his nose was perfectly proportioned to his bone structure. I mean he was not a tall man…170 centimetres, Bradley Cooper is 1.85 centimetres. Why didn’t he have his legs shortened?

Prosthetics have come a long way in movies and can be extraordinary in the Marvel comic world, but hell, what about imagination? I had the same reaction to Helen Mirren’s prosthetics in Golda. They were unnecessary. She looked enough like her without the moulded wax.

Meryl Streep looked nothing like Anna Wintour for The Devil Wore Prada or Maggie Thatcher for The Iron Lady. For Beattie, in the British Telecom adverts, I had a wig and glasses. I was 42. You get the attitude, the shoes and the stance right and the rest follows, because you say it is so.

After watching Gwilym Lee play Gareth Southgate, in Dear England, for the second time in a week, I found the actual Gareth Southgate, accepting his knighthood from the king, slightly less convincing.

I can’t wait to see Anne Reid play Elizabeth II in the new play The Queen and her Dresser on tour. Annie is from Jesmond, Newcastle, northern to her fingertips, 90 years old, forthright, ambitious and fearless. She won’t need more than lipstick, some pearls and a matching hat and coat. Rhapsody in Royal Blue.