At 58, Dawn French is busier than ever. She talks to Lydia Jenkin about love the second time around, her body confidence, and the secrets she’s spilling in her new one-woman show.
The phone rings twice and a male voice answers. For half a second that seems perplexing - Dawn French might be good at playing all sorts of characters, but she doesn't usually sound like a man. But of course, it's her husband Mark Bignell - they're in the car, driving into town for a day of meetings and publicity, and he puts French on straight away, with an easy cheerful manner.
"Hello! I'm very well indeed, thank you, here in rainy old London," she answers in her friendly, faintly Devonshire accent.
Yes, that amiable, relaxed, and ever-so-slightly cheeky personality that she cultivated on screen for 20-odd years in French and Saunders and The Vicar of Dibley has plenty in common with French's own personality. She's perhaps a little calmer, a jot more serious, a smidgen more mature - but then she is 58 years old now. Or Thirty Million Minutes old, as the title of her new one-woman show describes it.
She performed it for the first time in Britain last year, but now she's taking it to the colonies, and coming to do a 10-date tour of New Zealand in March.
"I couldn't possibly do it without coming to New Zealand, to be honest. Don't tell the Aussies, but after Cornwall [her home], New Zealand is my most favourite place. I've been to New Zealand many times now, and it has a very special place in my heart. That's absolutely true."
French is happy to have had a chance to polish her performance before she comes here though, because she wasn't at all sure about the show when she began creating it.
"I was absolutely terrified when I started it. I'd never done anything quite like it before and, actually, I'd never really seen a show like it, I'm happy to say. I know all the things it isn't, but I find it very hard to describe what it actually is, because it's not stand-up, and it's not monologues, and it's not a slide show, but there are parts of all of those things in it."
The show Thirty Million Minutes came about through her desire to get up on stage once more and share some life lessons and amusing anecdotes, as well as a long-held wish to collaborate with acclaimed theatre director Michael Grandage.
"I've always wanted to do a one-woman show, and I've always wanted to work with Michael, and amazingly he agreed. We worked together on it in Cornwall, and kind of shaped it, and I just wanted to tell stories really, through the medium of my own life, because I'm pretty sure that most of the stories I've got to tell are the same stories that most of us have. I try to introduce the audience to the people who made me, the people that I've learned my lessons from, both good and bad. And I'm trying to work out really, how to be a functioning female human. I haven't quite managed it yet, but that's what I'm attempting to do," she laughs.
"I have a few little rants, and I talk about all the funny stuff, and I also try to be honest enough to talk about all the difficult stuff as well."
French's show Thirty Million Minutes.
French has certainly had her fair share of the difficult stuff, but she's made the bold and admirable decision to share it on stage. She talks about her father Denys' unexpected suicide when she was 19, which she touched on in her autobiographical book of letters, Dear Fatty, but has otherwise remained a fairly private matter. She talks about her weight and her body, her uterine cancer scare, and even her divorce - she split, amicably, with fellow comedian Lenny Henry in 2010 after 26 years of marriage.
Delving into all those emotional topics on stage night after night might sound daunting, even exhausting to many of us, but French is revelling in the opportunity.
"It is emotional, but I don't find it exhausting actually. I find it exhilarating, to be honest. It feels like a mixture between a performance and a chat with the audience. I've never really spoken like this in public before, but there's something incredibly liberating about being so open and honest.
"I didn't set out at all for this to be therapeutic for me, I didn't imagine that it would be, but there's no doubt about the fact that telling these stories, both difficult and cheerful, made me feel a little bit lighter. And there's also no doubt that the more feedback I've had from people saying, 'Yes, that happened to me too' or 'Yes, I know someone who's been through that' or 'Yes, I've felt like that before', the more sharing of it that I do with the audience, the lighter I become because of it."
She certainly resisted including the darker, more tragic events to begin with, but she credits Grandage with helping her to see the merit in it.
"I think it would've been different if I'd tried to edit out the tricky stuff. Michael really encouraged me to be honest and truthful and authentic about difficult areas. You don't get to be 58 without some difficult stuff in your life. By the time you've had some illness and death and divorce around you, these are all things to learn from, and I can only proceed through life the way my parents taught me to, which is with humour."
It's clear her parents remain a solid force in her life. She adored her father, and credits him greatly for giving her the necessary self-esteem to pursue drama. There's one particularly poignant anecdote that she shares, about her first disco at the age of 13. She came downstairs wearing some specially chosen bright purple suede hot pants, feeling half bold and half self-conscious, and her father gave her a wonderful pep talk about how valuable and beautiful she was, and how she deserved the best. No questioning her fashion choices, or demanding "You're not going out like that", just giving her the inward confidence to look after herself.
Her mother, who passed away in 2012, is just as present in French's mind. She talks about the opening night of Thirty Million Minutes, coming out of her dressing room, and being absolutely terrified of going on stage - "more terrified than for anything else I've ever done". She had a moment of wondering whether to head left to the exit or right to the stage, but recalled a favourite phrase of her mother's: "The only way out is through."
While there are few taboo topics with French these days, she is cautious about drawing her living family (which includes her 24-year-old daughter Billie, adopted with Henry, and her two 20-something step-children with Bignell) into the conversation.
"I'm okay to talk about almost anything to be honest, but there are people who I need to protect who haven't chosen to speak out as openly as me, so I do have to be careful about the people I need to look after, and I do definitely do that in this show. For instance, my kids aren't involved at all, except for a few little baby photographs, which I absolutely got approval from my daughter to show."
Of course, Thirty Million Minutes isn't the only project French has been working on. Somehow, while working on her hit stage show, she also wrote her third novel, According To Yes.
Like her previous books, it's an intimate reflection of French, while also being entirely fictional. The heroine is Rosie Kitto, a 38-year-old primary school teacher from Cornwall, who decides to take a life-changing leap after dealing with the tragedy of infertility, and heads off to New York to become a nanny for a rich American family.
It's somewhat inspired by French's own experiences as an 18-year-old babysitter in New York, and Rosie is certainly a vivacious, inventive, curvy woman, with a love of laughter and food, who has decided to live her life, for a while at least, according to "yes!". An enthusiasm and positivity and open-heartedness radiates from Rosie in such a way that you cannot help but compare her to French.
"It's true there are similarities, and I wrote it like that so I could write about her background and her family and her experience with some authenticity, because I wanted to be able to be truthful about where she's from and who she is.
Lenny Henry and ex-wife Dawn French in 2006. Photo / Getty Images
"But I couldn't possibly say that she's me - she's someone I aspire to be, but not someone I am. Rosie is a little bit of what I know, but plenty of what I've visited in my imagination."
While writing some of the more racy sections in particular, French was determined that she was trying to become Rosie in her head, rather than letting Rosie become too much like her.
"Really, if you're trying to portray characters, you want to inhabit them as much as you can when you're writing them. So I've tried to write this very much as Rosie Kitto, I've tried to become her as I write about her. And certainly when I was writing some of the slightly saucier scenes, in order to write them, I had to remind myself who she is, and it's her having this experience, not me, and that freed me up quite considerably."
According To Yes also sees her taking a new approach to her writing style, inspired by her "very clever" uncle Dr Michael O'Brien, who is a professor at Cambridge University.
"I discovered how much I like writing when I wrote Dear Fatty, and I wrote that in the form of letters to people in my life, so that the reader could kind of eavesdrop on the letters. And then my first novel [A Little Bit Marvellous] I wrote in diary form between a mother, a daughter and a friend, so I could see the three different takes on the same incident. And then I wrote another novel [Oh Dear Silvia], which was a bit like a lot of monologues really, because my central character was in a coma and everybody came into the room and spoke to that person, so you would piece together this kind of composite story from all the people.
"But this time, I rose to a bit of a challenge from my uncle, who the book is dedicated to, and whose approval I sought very much in my life. Sadly he died this year, but he told me that my second novel was definitely better than my first one, and he told me that I ought to have the courage now, to write chapters with people talking to each other. Sort of like I needed to grow up with my writing. And so that was my challenge with this one, to write conversations."
Both the show and the book have a similar spirit of adventure, a theme of taking a leap, and doing something outside one's comfort zone - something scary or challenging. It seems to be something that French holds dear at this point in her life, the opportunity to keep shaking things up.
"Absolutely! If you're a creative person you need to take risks regularly, and I would be very sad if I was repeating anything I'd done before, and that's what I'm really trying not to do. So anything that slightly frightens me, or represents a new challenge, then I'm interested. Anything that looks like 'Oh I see you want me to be in this sitcom that's a bit like one I already made', then no, I'm not interested in that."
That's not to say a sitcom isn't in her future plans. After an eight-year break from the world of television comedy and drama (she was a judge on Australia's Got Talent for a season in 2013, and there were a few guest-starring roles, but otherwise she's been pretty quiet), there are two possible TV projects on her list at the moment - a sitcom about a British woman in New York and a drama set in Cornwall.
But she is enjoying balancing her collaborative creative pursuits with her more solitary, book-writing ones.
"I have one more book in my contract with Penguin, to write for sure - which I won't do next year, but I will do the year after. And after that who knows - I definitely hope to do more books in the future, because I love it, I love sitting at home in Cornwall and writing. But I also might do some more television. I'm mixing it up!"
Dawn French performs Thirty Million Minutes, at the Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch from March 14-16; at The Opera House, Wellington from March 21-23, and The Civic, Auckland from March 29-April 1. Tickets from ticketmaster.co.nz.
