Dawn French’s midlife survival guide

Or maybe it’s more the case that, for more than 30 years, since she first met Jennifer Saunders at Central School of Speech and Drama, there has been so much noise and activity around her – funny characters, funny faces, funny outfits, gags, spoofs, jokes – that she’s rarely been “still” enough for us to see her properly.

But while Dawn French is the same on the outside – it’s difficult to imagine her looking any other way – there has been a drastic shift on the inside, she says, one that is the result of many changes in her life: getting older (she’s 58) and caring less, she tells me; leaving London for Cornwall, where much of her energy these days is spent on writing novels rather than appearing in various high-profile television shows (French and Saunders, The Vicar of Dibley). There have been significant emotional and physical milestones, too.

In 2011 she had what she calls a very “freeing” hysterectomy, after years of gynaecological issues. She lost 7st for the operation, conducted because of a suspicion that she had uterine cancer (she didn’t). The weight loss was assumed by the red tops to be down to stress at the breakdown of her marriage to Lenny Henry the year before, in 2010. Henry had a decade earlier been exposed as having had a night in a hotel with another woman, and subsequently checked into the Priory suffering from depression. Their divorce was unconnected to all this, however; more a result of their marriage sadly reaching the end of the road.

They are still famously good friends, “co-parent” their 24-year-old daughter, Billie, whom they adopted as an infant, and French is loyal to the letter.

“I don’t believe he is a depressive person. I think he just had sad moments in his life. If you live in the public eye you’re not allowed to have just the ordinary moments in life, that might fell you for a minute but then you pick yourself up the next day.”

In 2011, after the operation and feeling suddenly just terrific, she met Mark Bignell, a friend of her mother and the chief executive of a rehab charity in Cornwall. “He’d helped me with the research for my second novel, and I was politely chatting to him while we had a cup of tea and then suddenly I saw him, really saw him, and thought, ‘Oh my God!’ ”

Her mother, who died in 2012, was still alive at the time – “I think of him as her present to me” – and French got on the phone immediately to ask her if Bignell was single. He was. They married two years ago after he proposed in a gondola in Venice.

Bignell, who has been married twice before, is “extremely cheerful and very optimistic”. French is quite obviously beside herself with happiness. “Don’t take from that anything different about [Henry],” she says quickly, no doubt sensing that I had immediately thought it must be the opposite of being married to Lenny Henry, with all his complexities and various issues with his past. (He has talked about his shame at being made to perform in The Black and White Minstrel Show.) “That was a different set of wonderful things,” French says.

“This [man] is just very emotionally curious. I’m very unafraid of the future and how we can manage it all. I just know we’ll do our best together. With this man I’m going to deal with it. I just know we will cope with whatever it is. Bring it on.

“We just know stuff; stuff that you will leave behind and not bother with, stuff that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to waste any time. You have to slice through any crap and get to absolute honesty, and I love that.

“When you are younger you are still working out who you are. I know who I am now. I’m never going to try to pretend to be anything else. I am in shape and I’ve met a man who is in shape, formed, and now we are making this third thing, which is so exciting. It’s fantastic.”

There’s the added joy, she says, of now having two stepchildren, aged 21 and 24, to join Billie, adopted after years of agonising infertility. This features in her novel, which tells the story of a 38-year-old woman unable to get pregnant, who runs away from her life to become a nanny in New York. It clearly draws on her own years of sadness over not being able to conceive, but she says that weirdly she had the idea for the story when she was 18, when she won a debating scholarship to attend Spence School, a top private institution in New York, for a year. She didn’t know it was a sadness waiting for her.

‘‘Don’t forget, when it comes to infertility there are two people in every couple,” she says. “Interesting that everybody always assumes that it was my problem. But it’s a shared problem and it is a very insidious and difficult thing to deal with inside a marriage.

“Big pats on the back for us in that marriage for surviving that because it can create a massive chasm. It’s a sledgehammer. You have to be strong to cope, and we did. We cleaved together more and more.”

Still, at 58 she finally has the bigger family she always wanted. The sadness at the end of her first “nuclear” family – “You can’t have a 30-year great throbbing important relationship like that and just say, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ when it’s gone” – has been eclipsed by something new, by her simply having more people rather than less to love.

“It’s a remarkable thing,” she says, clearly almost unable to believe her luck. “I always wanted more kids and now I’ve got fully grown ones who are the easiest people to love that I have come across in my whole life, except for my own daughter. I have these three people in my life who are my purpose.”

Her stepchildren, she says, “really checked me out”. But, very quickly and together with Billie, they began lobbying their parents to marry. These days French and Bignell live in the clifftop mansion in southeast Cornwall that she bought shortly before she broke up with Henry (“He had the other house and I kept this one”). Pictures of it make it look like a Disney castle, perched high up overlooking the sea, and she loves it. The three children live nearby, as does her best friend of 40 years – they moved to be near to each other – with whom she walks the dog on the beach. “I’m not really famous in Cornwall,” she says (her mother was from Cornwall). “Nobody down there gives a toss, which is great,” she says, though not strictly true, as earlier this year she was appointed chancellor of Falmouth University.

French acknowledges in all of this that her happiness is not just chance. There has also been a significant change of attitude to her life. It’s why she’s called her new book According to Yes, and as she writes of her main character, Rosie (read French for this), “She is the person who, a couple of weeks ago, said no to all the even keel, and yes to grabbing life by the throat, yes to jumping off the edge, yes to what the hell’s it going to be like? Yes to being afraid. YES, YES, YES PLEASE!”

French says that she has willed herself into a more positive approach to life. It was a letting-go, of sorts, of a tendency over the previous three decades towards worry, anxiety and a need to “control” everything around her for fear she might lose those she loved the most. It was, she thinks now, probably to do with the fact that in 1977, having just returned from her New York exchange, her father, Denys – whom she adored – killed himself by rigging up a hosepipe to the exhaust pipe of his car. Her brother, Gary, found him. They had no idea he suffered depression, just that he needed to sometimes have a lie-down.

Their childhood, peripatetic as it was because of his job as a corporal technician for the RAF, had been entirely stable until that point.

“I’m not a shrink but here, with my dad’s suicide, was something that was beyond my control and I think I’ve felt ever since I ought to keep an eye on people who are close to me and if anyone is a bit sad, I am certainly going to jump in. Any of my friends will tell you that I’m a pain in the arse … because I am going to risk our friendship by saying, ‘Are you OK? What can I do?’ Not that I think I am the fixer … You’ve just got an extra eye open. You’re mindful of what could possibly happen. If your dad kills himself when you are 18, you are going to keep your eyes open.”

Next month sees the opening of the London run of her extremely successful, autobiographical, one-woman show, Thirty Million Minutes (the title a reference to how long French has been alive), directed by Michael Grandage. The show toured last year and among the most affecting sections is a recorded segment by her friend Liza Tarbuck, reading the part of French’s autobiography, Dear Fatty, in which she writes to her father asking him why he killed himself. It is the most powerful piece of autobiographical writing I think I’ve ever read.

“Was it our fault for not noticing? Did you want us to stop you? Did you pray that someone would knock on the car window at the very last moment and drag you out? Did you consider that we couldn’t – can’t – live properly without you? So, you lied when you told me you would always be there for me? I’m in f***ing agony, you selfish bastard, don’t you care? But if I love you, I have to try to understand. And I do love you. SO much. And I miss you. Profoundly miss you. And I do forgive you.”

She knew she couldn’t do it on stage, “but Michael said I couldn’t do a show and not talk about it. If I am going to do a show and talk about the people who made me, I can not include my dad but then not tell [the audience] what happened.”

His death was devastating for her, for all of them, but her mother insisted she went to drama school as planned, and then it was onwards and upwards because, she says, by the time he died, she already had a lot of the self-esteem he’d given her “in my back pocket and my mum’s advice in my other back pocket”. There followed The Comic Strip Presents..., French and Saunders, The Vicar of Dibley and fame – lucrative, primetime TV fame. French was one half of not just one famous pairing (Saunders), but two (Henry).

“But,” she says, smiling widely, “I am in a new chapter of my life. Writing is one of the first things I’ve done that isn’t collaborative. I’ve now got a part of my life that is all me – every decision, every decision about every word, is me, and I really love that.

“I think I had to have a loud, noisy time in the dressing-up box, a playful, loud life, to then desire a quieter, more introverted time now.”

Everybody wants to know about Dawn French’s size. “I have never done an interview without people talking about my weight. I am not stupid. I know this is what people seem to want. I wish they didn’t. It’s my shell, that’s all it is. Move on.’’

An acquaintance once recalled spotting French and Henry in the interval of a theatre performance sitting down at a table, unwrapping a big bar of chocolate and working their way through the lot. It’s a refreshing characteristic not to care about what people think, be it about how much you eat or how big or small your body is, but it is quite rare, as French knows.

“When I realised that so many other women I met had such massive problems about [weight], I thought, ‘Why don’t I feel like this? Why am I not in this same hellish place? Why do I have a little bit of confidence about my body and my sexual presence?’

“I’ve never been somebody to have sex with the lights off. I don’t mind getting my gear off, I never have, and I think, ‘Why is this different?’ And all I could think of was that in my family this was not an issue. All I had was praise, especially from my father … He said some stuff that helped me to have a lot of self-esteem. I only understood that as I got older.” (In Dear Fatty, French recalls wearing a pair of purple hotpants and him telling her she looked utterly fabulous.)

French has devoted a whole section to her size in Thirty Million Minutes, precisely because of the endless fascination with it. She rolls up her clothes and shows the audience her stomach. “Yes, I’ve got this big tummy, and I show it and I make jokes about it that I control. I show people how I feel about my bosoms and my legs and my neck and my shoulders and my feet, all of it. I go through it all, really, because I want to have a celebration.

“Why the hell are we giving ourselves such a hard time?”

French has not always been the size she is now. As a teenager, she was not skinny, but she was not fat either. “Jennifer and I have often talked about it, looking back at pictures of us as teenagers where we are nothing less than gorgeous, and yet we are so hard on ourselves.

“I have had my own teenager and I’ve watched the agony of people going through all this body hatred. But if you grow up in a household with me, one thing you are going to know is that there is not going to be any torture about what shape you are. If you want to lose a bit of weight, I’ll help you with that. I’ve got nothing against it. If you don’t want to, I’m OK with that. My daughter is not me.”

In According to Yes, there are some very full-on sex scenes involving French’s plump heroine, Rosie. The book’s baddie, as it were, is starved and tiny, and Rosie is the polar opposite of this Glenn, a social x-ray and one of those women for whom being a bigger size would be unforgiveable. But it’s Rosie who gets the men. To say any more would be giving too much away, but here’s Rosie having sex with one of her admirers: “He rolls with her heaves and twists, fast and slow, as he watches her fleshy body ripple and writhe above him. She’s a human thunderstorm, she’s a tornado, unstoppable. His temples are pounding as she gathers him in her vortex and for a short wonderful while, they flow together, rotation on the same axis, towards a splendid inevitability …”

“It was a bit hot in my office, I have to say,” says French laughing at the memory of writing the sex scenes (French’s PA then typed them up from her longhand draft). “It’s very interesting when you write sex because you might write things that you know, that you’ve experienced, things that you might fantasise about, things that you haven’t experienced at all and don’t fantasise about …But you have to go there.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen any erotica? But there are no thin people in erotica,” French continues. I shake my head politely.

“When I think about fecund, er, active, kind of sexually interested girls, I immediately think about curvy girls. It doesn’t occur to me not to think about that.” French is as unembarrassed about discussing sex as she is about weight.

We flick through the photographs of various stages of her life, selected for Dear Fatty. One is a picture of her as a late teen with long hair in a bikini, covered by a gauzy tight top, looking moodily into the camera. The caption says, “Moody and recently sexed.” Even she gasps at this. “I can’t believe I wrote that … but I think it’s cheating if you don’t include a few photographs that make you feel uncomfortable, don’t you?”

All this honesty and frankness make her fantastically good company. She adores women, she says, another appealing quality about her. “Aren’t women amazing?” she says. “Women are mighty.”

She wants to know where my jacket is from (Marni discount outlet in Florence – “Sorry, you’ve lost me on Marni, but I’m impressed by the Florence bit”); where I bought my silver brogues (cheap as chips, F&F at Tesco – “Good girl,” she cries). Then we move on to her outfit: the boots are blue suede Penelope Chilvers, which are most definitely not cheap as chips, but she loves them so much and they are so comfy that she has another pair at home, exactly the same, which she keeps in a drawstring bag for her official chancellor duties (“Oh, I wish I could tell you they are from Tesco”).

She has one best friend – called the Mighty Best Friend – whom she has known for 40 years and who is nearby. She won’t say who she is, but it sounds like another friend from drama school. “She knows everything about me and I know everything about her and she is my beating heart.”

After her, she has a group of about five people, including Jennifer Saunders. They have matching tattoos, two small stars signifying their partnership. French’s are on her left wrist and Saunders’ on her ankle. “They’re very badly done,” French tells me. “The boys who did them were shaking because they recognised us. But we wanted to mark the end of French and Saunders and I said to her, ‘Really, buying you a bracelet is not enough.’ ”

Then there are Liza Tarbuck and Kathy Burke. Bignell, unsullied by any interest in celebrity (he’d never seen French on TV), once asked French, when she said that Burke was coming to stay, “Is she a newsreader?” (Imagine! The prospect of Burke with newsreader hair – even better than eavesdropping on Burke and French talking about sex.)

There are a few more people in this group of “very important women’”, plus a couple of men. Henry is not part of it, “Because you have to move on, you have to separate from that person in order to reclaim your future.” But, she says, “There is a definite friendship and there is a kindness and massive respect, and we co-parent our daughter.”

It’s with some of these women – “You will know them well” – that she shares a raging Big Brother obsession. “Honestly, it’s a fantastic connection. My fingers are bleeding from the texting going on.” She’s been known to come back from holiday and watch recorded episodes back to back through the night.

“Are you really shocked by these big arse implants?” she asks of a recent Celebrity Big Brother contestant. “Is it the Kardashian thing?” she asks. She genuinely wants to know.

But surely most of the contestants are anathema to you? French is appalled at this.

“If for a second you think their behaviour is hideous, you [also] think, ‘Oh my God, I can see a bit of myself in that.’ That’s good. It’s a mirror. I love it when it’s wonderful and s*** and when it’s dreadful and edifying.”

She loves dragging Bignell along to the BB house – maybe he thinks they’re newsreaders, too? The crew know her and she’s allowed to walk about in the camera rat runs and peer in at the contestants. “We’re all truly hideous, aren’t we?” she says.

She is very unshowy about her celebrity. Her daughter is totally unimpressed: “She couldn’t be less interested. Her interest is in me as a mother and nothing else. She has a massive disdain for anything to do with fame. BIG TICK. I’m proud of that. It’s great.”

Before we were properly introduced, I had watched her recording the audiobook of According to Yes with three unfamous actors reading the various different parts. Her touch was extremely light. She didn’t jump in if the intonation was wrong, and if a correction had to be made, she waited for somebody to ask her opinion. And they all talked about their various heartaches and disappointments.

“I am not going to claim to be the bravest or the saddest,” French says of losing her father young and then, three years ago, her mother. (“As I age I see my mum appearing on my face and how can I mind that?”)

“I think I am right down the middle as far as having regular experiences that almost everybody else has had. My dad died, my mum died … Bleak periods? Yes. But none of this is anything my friends haven’t already experienced.

“Listen, these are f***ing broad shoulders. I am not going to be toppled by anything.”

According to Yes by Dawn French, published by Michael Joseph on October 22, is available from the Times Bookshop for £18 (RRP £20), free p&p, on 0845 2712134; timesbooks.co.uk. Thirty Million Minutes is at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, from November 11-December 5. To book, go to dawnfrenchontour.com

Shoot credits
Styling: Rachel Fanconi
Hair: Michael Douglas at Red Represents
Make-up: Cheryl Phelps-Gardiner at aartlondon.co.uk using Clinique
Dawn French wears top, Choise (navabi.co.uk), ring, H Stern (hstern.net), trilby, christys’ (christys-hats.com)