Dame Maureen Lipman has revealed that she is now engaged again after proposing "as a joke".
The 78-year-old Coronation Street actress is to marry David Turner, also 78, a business consultant who lives in Belsize Park.
In a column in The Spectator, she announced that "with a combined age of 156, we are going to get married".
Lipman confessed that she had been against "the 'M' word", but described how they had been on a train journey back from Edinburgh when her partner mentioned it was Tu B'Av, a minor Jewish festival when it is traditionally acceptable for a woman to propose.
She said: "Unable to resist the gag, I slid under the table separating us on to one knee and asked him for his hand.
"To my surprise and slight panic, he gave it."
They later celebrated their engagement, she wrote, "at a crêperie stall in Hampstead high street and bought two rubbery cheese and mushroom crêpes, which we ate too quickly in the car, bum-warmer heating switched on".
Lipman has found love in her seventies following the loss of her husband of 30 years, Jack Rosenthal, and then her subsequent partner of 13 years, Guido Castro.
The actress, who previously lived in Muswell Hill, announced her engagement on Rosenthal’s birthday, September 8.
She said: "My late, great husband Jack Rosenthal’s birthday would have been on September 8.
"So, armed with a birthday cake, we set off in David’s car to tell first my kids, then his, about our engagement."
She said that after seeing a "double rainbow" they travelled to the four separate houses of Turner's three grown-up children and his youngest brother to "drop the bombshell".
"All reactions were warm, and all were individual.
"One child said that he needed time ‘to process’."
On the same day of her announcement, Lipman also had her car stolen but managed to receive help from two Metropolitan Police officers, whom she praised for their "impeccable" work.
On the surprising coincidence regarding one of the officers, she penned, "improbably, one of the officers, whose surname was Hussein, turned out to have a Jewish mother.
"They’re both coming to the wedding."
The actress, known for her varied career that spans playing Beattie in BT's ad campaigns to securing roles in the National Theatre, revealed her relationship with Turner in a Spectator column last year about getting back on the dating scene.
In the column titled "My return to dating," she detailed a date she went on the birthday of her late partner, technology expert Guido Castro, whom she described as her second "soulmate".
Commenting on the date, Lipman shared: "We are tentative.
"It was my late partner Guido’s birthday so in his honour we ate bottarga with lemon, olive oil and garlic and a glass of malbec."
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