Halfway through typing up the longhand draft of Dawn French’s latest novel (“I don’t own a computer,” the comedian confesses), her PA of 34 years, Sue, called her, concerned. “There was a tone in her voice and I thought, oh, she’s doubting one of the characters,” French recalls. “But she just said, ‘Are you all right?’ ”
French sighs and gives a wry chuckle. “That was the first time I thought, oh f***, I’m going to have to deal with people checking in on me. I’ll have to deflect people’s thoughts that I might not be OK.”
It is a legitimate question. French — beloved fictitious vicar, one half of the UK’s most famous female comedy duo, bona fide national treasure and now bestselling novelist — has written a story about suicide.
In writing a book about suicide, she realised, “I’m going to have to deal with people checking in on me”DAN KENNEDY for the times magazine
“I don’t want people to think that I’m writing my plan — I’m not,” she insists. Yet, in writing it, “I’ve faced a lot of my thoughts and fears about it. It’s helpful to put your face in the shit and then come up and breathe fresh air afterwards.”
‘As I’ve got older, I want to talk about the big things’
In September 1977, when French was 19, her father, Denys, an RAF engineer, took his own life. He was 45. “Suicide lives in my brain in a way it might not for somebody who hasn’t experienced it so closely,” she says. “And as I’ve got older, I want to talk about the big things. I set out to write something I’m a bit afraid to admit: that getting older is difficult, end of life is difficult, suicide is difficult.”
There is an awful lot of the author in her new novel. Enough is set in Cornwall, where French was raised and has lived for the past two decades, with a protagonist, Etta — busily plotting her own demise — who is precisely French’s age: 68. “It’s slightly lazy of me, because I don’t have to think about the politics, the music — I know everything about being my age,” she says.
The book’s title is not intended as a negative — Etta hasn’t “had enough”, but rather, French explains, “It is enough.” And she has a point. “What more selfless act could you make than sacrifice your life so that your children don’t have to deal with the crunchy, grim part of it?”
French’s daughter, Billie, whom she adopted as a baby with her first husband, Lenny Henry, is now 34 and lives close by, with a daughter of her own. French also has an adult stepson and stepdaughter, Olly, 31, and Lily, 34, via her second husband, the charity executive Mark Bignell, whom she married in 2013.
“I’m grateful to be this age. I won’t take a machete to my face”dan kennedy for the times magazine
“As I approach older age I do think about it. I don’t think I would ever make this choice,” French says — by which she means suicide — “but I can understand why somebody would.”
‘I’ve been through all the stages of grief’
We’re drinking tea in a whitewashed terraced cottage down a small side street in Plymouth, Devon, which was once the HQ of the famed local jeweller Drakes and has been converted into recording studios where French and her longtime comedy partner, Jennifer Saunders, record their podcast, Titting About. It’s a convenient midway spot, since French lives just over the border in Cornwall, reportedly in a secluded 1868 gothic revival villa, while Saunders lives in a grade II listed manor house on Dartmoor.
I arrive early, rainswept and windswept, shortly before French, who is sporting a jaunty red beret atop her sleek grey bob. Short, cheerful, warm, sweary and animated — it’s a relief to find that French, unlike many famous entertainers, on whom we tend to project their TV persona, is seemingly almost exactly the same off screen as on. And in spite of the serious subject matter, our conversation, which ends up lasting well over two hours, could not feel less laboured or heavy.
“When you lose your dad at 19 and you have this whole life to go through, all those stages of grief — from being perplexed to sadness, anger, understanding and forgiveness — I think you have claimed the right, a little bit, to write about this with some… Optimism is the wrong word, but with some positive aspect to it,” she says.
Among her future plans, “I have a one-woman show in mind”Dan Kennedy for The Times Magazine
With Jennifer Saunders on The Tube in 1983Rex
“Although part of the process of understanding suicide is to go through the rage about it and to say, ‘You selfish f***er, how dare you do that to us?’ And I certainly went through that for a while,” she admits. “But very quickly I thought, ‘Yes, but my dad wouldn’t be that selfish. So let me try and reframe this. Let me think it through further.’
“I think my dad lived his whole life with this suicidal ideation and with depression, with these black dogs,” French says. “And I don’t know all the facts of it, but he’d made an attempt on his life when he was a younger man at [the RAF base] Halton as a trainee.”
By the time he took his own life, Denys and her mother, Felicity — known as Roma — ran a newsagent’s. “Leaving the RAF is a huge thing. And back in the day, I’m not sure they helped people to leave very well — you were out in civvy street.”
He was, she says, given “some kind of electroconvulsive therapy, which was supposed to jolt him out of this lethargy. And no talking therapy, which is clearly what needed to happen.”
Her own experience of her father when she was a child, though, was “happy, long, lazy, lovely days”, she says. “Then my dad would have a migraine and have to go to bed and we had to be quiet. Curtains would be drawn.”
She remembers times when her mother would ask her to come home from boarding school because her father had a migraine. “I think my mum knew that if I was there he wouldn’t do anything, and there was somebody to watch over him. Even though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, aged 14 or 15.”
In the aftermath of Denys’s death, “a square of a family, with the mum and dad and a brother and a sister, became a triangle”, French says, forming the shapes with her fingers. “And that triangle never stopped talking about it. My mum’s gone now, but my brother, Gary, and I always talk about it. Just to check in on each other and to make it OK.”
French admits to some trepidation about how Enough will land with readers. While her previous books have sold by the bucketload — her 2008 memoir, Dear Fatty, shifted 800,000 copies, making it the second highest-selling celebrity memoir that year, and the first of her four previous novels, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, published in 2010, sold more than 720,000 copies, including almost 45,000 in its first week — French is studiously modest about their success.
In The Vicar of Dibley with Emma ChambersAlamy
French as a teenager with her late father, DenysInstagram/DawnFrench
“My books have always been published in October, ready for Christmas — it’s nice and easy to wrap for your mum, if she likes French and Saunders — and supermarkets take a whole load,” she demurs.
I pull her up for diminishing her objectively massive sales. “I’m delighted,” she insists. “Listen, I’m writing them for people to read.” With Enough, though, she asked her publisher if the book could be released at a different time of year. “This just didn’t feel like a Christmas theme,” she says, deadpan.
‘Jennifer is still the person who makes me laugh the most’
Next year it will be 40 years since French and Saunders hit screens, and 45 years since the pair first appeared as part of Channel 4’s cult hit The Comic Strip Presents… alongside Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson. Ahead of meeting French, I fall deep down a rabbit hole rewatching old French and Saunders sketches, delighted to find that they still feel fresh, relevant and very funny. “She still is the person who makes me laugh the most in the world,” French says of Saunders.
With Jennifer Saunders, receiving the Bafta fellowship in 2009PA
The duo’s Titanic sketch from their 1998 Christmas specialAlamy
But while they continue to collaborate on their podcast and various radio projects, anyone holding out hope for another French and Saunders sketch may well be disappointed. “We’re out of practice. You’ve got to put different teeth in and different eyes in and a different wig on. You’ve got to race about — it’s a young person’s game,” she says. “Plus, when you get to this sort of age you can’t play a teenager, it just looks creepy and weird.”
Which is not to say that they don’t think about it. “We will text each other: ‘Begging for it,’ ” she says. “Meaning, ‘I’ve just seen Barbie,’ and acknowledging that if we were still doing this, we’d have a go at that, wouldn’t we? We’d love it.”
What they are not too old for, happily, is panto: this winter, the pair will reunite on a West End stage for the first time in 17 years for the London Palladium’s reliably starry pantomime, in this case Cinderella, with Julian Clary and Nigel Havers. “It is always a spectacle,” French says. “I think The Guardian called it a ‘tsunami of smut’, and it is that, because of Julian. [Clary starred in the 2016 production, also at the Palladium.] I’ve never been involved with something as rude as those pantos. We were waiting for Cinderella because it’s got the Ugly Sisters, of course — perfect for us.
“You do 70 shows inside five weeks or so, it’s mad,” she continues, beaming. “Two shows a day, six days a week. You just don’t have a life. You don’t have Christmas, but you are Christmas,” she says. “And I can give you this exclusive: there will be an element of Kardashian about how we are presenting ourselves.”
With the second series of her BBC sitcom Can You Keep a Secret? filming before that, “that’s me knowing what I’m doing every single day until the end of January. And I’m delighted. I love the control; I love knowing what’s coming.”
With Craig Roberts in the BBC sitcom Can You Keep A Secret? BBC
An itinerant childhood
She was born in Holyhead, Wales, and French’s early years were itinerant as Denys’s job demanded that they move every 18 months or so, across the UK and to Germany and Cyprus. She attended “six or seven” junior schools.
For secondary school, the RAF paid boarding school fees for Dawn and Gary. “My parents couldn’t believe what a privilege it was,” French says. “But it also meant that they were dragged into a world they didn’t know. My mum always put on a hat and a Hyacinth Bucket accent to try to match the other parents at speech day. She thought that they would look down on her. And so she tried to elevate herself in a really embarrassing way.
“It’s very hard, when you’ve had a suicide in your family, to claim that you had a great dad,” she says. “Because if you had a great dad, then why did that happen?” But Denys filled his daughter with confidence and self-esteem, telling her she was beautiful, even when — as she recounts in Dear Fatty — she came downstairs, aged 16, in purple hotpants.
That father-daughter dynamic is “absolutely key” for women, French believes. “You measure every other male by your dad,” she says. “Now if your dad’s shit, you’re going to suffer all sorts of shit, but if you’ve had a great dad, why would you settle for less than that? That’s your template. Not to say that you can’t make some mistakes — we all do — but you value yourself if you’ve been valued by your dad.”
With ex-husband Lenny Henry and daughter Billie, 2005Rex/shutterstock
Her mum, she says, was no less crucial. “And she had to be even greater to be a mum and a dad to us for a lot of years.” After Denys’s death, Roma got a second wind, French tells me. “I would come home and find these notes on her mantelpiece saying, ‘Thank you, Roma. You’ve saved my life.’ And I said, ‘What’s this? Who are these people?’ She’d say, ‘Oh, there’s a boy up the road. He’s been sniffing glue and his dad fiddled with him when he was young. He just doesn’t understand life and he comes in for a cup of tea.’ My mum was having every drug addict on Mutley Plain [in Plymouth, where the family lived] in her house for a cup of tea and a chat.”
Her mother’s informal social work led to more organised efforts to raise money and, in particular, to requisition empty properties. Roma founded a women’s refuge in an empty house that grew to take up an entire residential square, and had a vast derelict Admiralty building converted into a recovery centre.
Roma died in 2012 but not before introducing her daughter to Bignell, whom she knew through the charity sector. He was helping French with research for her second novel when things took a turn for the romantic. “I think of him as her present to me,” she has said.
Fame, success and marriage
Roma was firm, in the wake of Denys’s death, that Dawn take up her place as planned at the Central School of Speech and Drama. There she met Saunders, with whom she bonded over their RAF fathers and childhoods spent moving around. While both were training to become drama teachers, shortly after graduation they auditioned for the Comic Strip troupe and unexpectedly became TV stars aged 25. In 1985 they had a hit with ITV’s Girls on Top, with Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman, and in 1987 the BBC gave them their own show, French and Saunders. It remains one of the most successful and popular female-created comedy series.
For more than 25 years, French was also half of one of comedy’s favourite off-screen couplings, married to Lenny Henry until their apparently amicable separation in 2010. Their much longed-for daughter, Billie, adopted after multiple miscarriages and failed IVF, now has her own four-year-old daughter, “a very, very prized grandchild”, reports a beaming French.
With her second husband, Mark Bignell, in 2013Wayne Perry/The Sun
“Recently she said to me, ‘Are you Dawn French?’ I nearly denied myself. I was so close to saying, ‘No, never heard of her. What do you mean?’ She’s not stupid, she picks up on things, but I’m going to have to curate this carefully,” she says. “Or make her sit down and watch it all.”
Aside from the “crunchy” aspects of getting old, as considered in the book, French is at peace with the physical side of the ageing process. No Joan Rivers-style surgery for her. “Let them see it. I’m f***ing grateful to be this age. I’ve made decisions about whether or not I’m going to take a machete to my face, and fine for anybody who wants to, but these are my decisions. People troll you and whatever, as if I would really care. Nothing will hurt me by criticising my age.”
Her body, meanwhile, is “always mentioned”, she says. And in reading previous interviews, I am staggered by the constant commentary on her weight. In one particularly horrifying interview from 2006, the piece begins, “How big is Dawn? It is an obsession. How can she be that big and that confident?”
“I feel a bit impervious to it now but you’re right, it’s shocking how much I’ve got used to reading this about myself. I just skim through and go, oh, there’s that shit.
“Some things are unacceptable to say now, but it’s definitely still there,” she says. “But I’m too long in the tooth. I can’t even find the place where it hurts, because it doesn’t any more. I had such a lot of it.”
I suggest that now, though, public shaming has shifted. While cruel comments about people’s appearance are (somewhat) less acceptable, we shame public figures in other ways: most notably, we cancel them.
‘We’re living in very tricky times’
French has experienced this first hand too. In June 2025, she posted a 40-second video about Gaza, which prompted immediate heated criticism on social media. French quickly removed the post and apologised, explaining that her intention had been “to mock and point the finger of shame at the behaviour of the cruel leaders on all sides of this atrocious war”.
In October 2023, in an interview in this paper, French said, “Comedy is supposed to offend a bit. You’ve got to be a bit edgy and I would fight for people’s right to do that,” but joked that she was “too old” to worry about being cancelled.
The backlash from her post last June was therefore not a situation one imagines French expected to find herself in.
“What I can say is the whole experience was shocking and edifying,” she says. “I know so much. I now see how it works and how people attempt to make it work, and it’s fascinating.” She plans, eventually, to turn it into art. “I have a one-woman show in mind. I have to be sufficiently distanced from it and our world needs to be different before I think I can say the things I need to say.”
I remind French of her public endorsement of Keir Starmer in 2020 and ask how satisfied she is now. French gives a hollow laugh. “I’m a paid-up [Labour] member and I will remain so, and I think that you have to fight from within,” she says. “I think we’re living in very tricky times. I think it’s hard to get it right. I have faith in that party.”
Her brother, a diehard Corbynite, has relinquished his membership. “We have very robust debates at all times. My take is: remain in and fight from within, properly. Fight with a vote, fight with your opinion, fight with everything.”
French checks her phone and discovers we’ve been talking for more than two hours. Her husband will be “circling” to collect her.
She’s not sure what the next book will be, just that there will be one. “I’ve got some thoughts. I try to let story ideas percolate and see what sticks and I think, ah yes, that’s a rich seam and I can add to that. ”
Certainly, she says, “I cannot imagine retiring yet.” Dawn French is definitely OK.
Enough by Dawn French (Michael Joseph, £25) is published on May 21. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Special discount available for Times+ members
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