‘A national treasure? I’ll take that, yes’
Dawn French talks to Matthew Stadlen about love, sex, jealousy and the joys – aswell as difficulties – of family life
It’s not every national treasure who’s happy to chat about their lesbian fantasies. But Dawn French is no ordinary national treasure. She is reassuringly wonderful in the flesh and delightfully indiscreet about herself. Now 58, she’s certainly not slim, but she’s surprisingly diminutive, with look-at-me eyes and a built-to-smile face. Her navy blue crepe shirt boasts a lace panel over the decolletage, “naughtily beckoning you to glance”, as she puts it. Recent reports that she is happy to do it with the lights on are accurate – although she doesn’t always. “I like to save money, thank you very much, on electricity,” she explains.
We meet in the offices of her PR in central London, the reason being the publication of the third French novel. It’s no small feat for a woman who started out in pursuit of a teaching career and fell into the alternative comedy circuit with her great friend Jennifer Saunders in the Eighties, before reaching icon status via French and Saunders and Richard Curtis’s Vicar of Dibley. Her one-woman show,
30 Million Minutes, is moving to the West End, too.
French is growing in confidence as a writer, though she says of the writing process: “It can be a complete torture. But good torture. You have to wrangle so much in your head.”
Sex is on the table today because there’s such a lot of it in the book,
According to Yes, which she wrote in long-hand with a pencil.
“You know this has got lots of sauce in it?” she says. Sauce, as she calls it, seems to rank quite highly in her list of priorities: in order of importance in her life, she confides, it probably goes love, kindness, forgiveness, sex.
French had to kiss Saunders – “it was lovely” – as part of a lesbian fantasy in
Me and Mamie O’Rourke, a play they did together in the mid-Nineties, and she has considered her sexual options in real life, too. “I’ve thought about it. I haven’t wanted to do it enough, otherwise I would have. I’ve fantasised about all kinds of things, including [women],” she says.
So is she definitely heterosexual or…? “As far as I know, I’m straight,” she says. “There are a couple of women that I think, ‘Oooh, I think I would with her!’ But they’re famous people in America. And actually confronted with the real, actual, throbbing person, I’m not sure I would.”
One wonders what her husband of two years, Mark Bignell, would make of all this. French married Bignell, who runs a charity for those with drug and alcohol problems, in 2013. They live in Cornwall in the house she once shared with ex-husband Lenny Henry, and her recipe for relaxation there is: “Book, pasty, husband, dog, beach.”
He’s 53 (she thinks), he makes her laugh, and she fancies the pants off him. But it wasn’t always so. He was a friend and colleague of her late mother and French never noticed him amorously until her 25-year marriage to Henry ended. Sitting in his office one day – she was researching cocaine addiction for a novel – the sun suddenly illuminated his face. “Like Zeffirelli or someone has lit him. It came in, bang! I just went, ‘Oh my God! Look at him!’ My mother, who was a bit away with the fairies and a bit spiritual, said, ‘Well, that was your father [whom French lionised and who killed himself when she was 18] saying, look at this man. Notice him!’ ” she says, although she doesn’t quite buy into all that.
French is beaming. “Course I’m smiling: I’m massively in love and that’s a complete surprise to me that this has happened in my life again,” she says.
After her divorce, she had to figure out her single identity. “That’s a little bit frightening, and also a very thrilling thing suddenly to reclaim yourself a bit.” She had to ask herself who she actually was.
Now French is adjusting to a new collaboration. “I must remember that what I really liked was being me [when I was] single. So I mustn’t come into this and allow myself to disappear into it, I must bring that into this and hold solidly on to it,” she says.
She is also besotted by her stepchildren, Olly, 21, and Lily, 24, but is alive to the feelings of Billie, also 24, whom she and Henry adopted at two weeks old. “I’ve got a daughter who bought a T-shirt for herself when she was about eight that said, ‘I’m an only child, let’s keep it that way’,” she says. “She perfectly well likes her new stepbrother and sister, but she has been an only kid for a long time, so I have to keep that in mind.
“Our relationship exists in a bizarre kind of process of peacetime, small battles, war. The peacetime is much more than the other two energies, but we have our wars. The love, thank God, is profound and I do thank God, because I love that kid so much that sometimes if I don’t like her or she doesn’t like me we survive it.”
While French wasn’t anticipating motherhood to be permanently “cheery”, she didn’t expect such challenges. “I expected that if you nurture [a child], like a tomato plant, it grows towards the light, and surely if your mum is someone who wants to have fun with you and have adventures and read with you and spend time with you, how could you ever have a war?
“But I haven’t got a kid who wants to read with me and have adventures with me, I’ve got a different kind of kid who’s a different kind of set of challenges and that’s been my lesson. Nothing is ever what you think it’s going to be at all. If the love wasn’t there I don’t know how we’d survive all this other stuff.”
Mother and daughter live just 12 minutes apart in Cornwall. “We could no longer live together – there would be murder. But we have to live nearby.”
Before she adopted Billie, French tried to have children herself, but has no regrets that she didn’t. “I had grief for a while. I did have miscarriages, so I’ve had grief about that as well. But the minute Billie arrived, that was it for me. She fills everything I needed to be as a mother,” she says.
In 2011, French had a hysterectomy after a uterine cancer scare. “They took it out – oh my God, the freedom! It’s marvellous. I’d had years of trouble,” she says. “My menopause was a very difficult time. People think that somehow something female about you has gone. The opposite is true. I didn’t need my womb any more.”
French and Henry remain good friends, but not in a day-to-day way, and she tries to be “mindful” of his girlfriend, producer Lisa Makin. “Poor Lisa has to constantly read about me and Lenny, as if that’s a thing,” she says magnanimously.
Does anything make French jealous? “Very long legs. I met Penny Lancaster again the other night and I can’t get over it,” she says. And then there’s her comedy partner, Saunders. “When she won her first Bafta for Ab Fab, I sent her a bunch of flowers that said, ‘Congratulations. I’m so happy for you, you c---,’” she laughs. “It’s kind of a cocktail of emotions but the overriding emotion is utter pride in her and utter love.”
The occasional expletive aside, the national treasure label really does seem to fit. “Something about the word treasure makes me think under the water at the bottom of the sea bed, and I don’t want to be there particularly,” she says. “But I’ll take that, happily, yes.”
‘I’ve fantasised about all kinds of things, including women’