Dawn of a new era
Silvia is a flawed person,’ says Dawn French, talking about her new book, ‘but she’s not quite the person you think she is when you first encounter her. Certainly, she’s behaved badly on occasion in the past, but sometimes for reasons you gradually come to understand. What I’m trying to show is that we are many different things to different people.’
Dawn chooses to tell her story via a succession of monologues, some sad, some funny, some a poignant mix of both. Not that this is entirely new territory for one of Britain’s funniest women, albeit in a different genre. ‘I’d chosen to write my autobiography, Dear Fatty, in the form of letters. When it came to my first work of fiction, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, I decided to write it in diary form – again, internal, first-person thoughts.’
She resolved to do the same for this second work of fiction and met an immediate obstacle. ‘My editor and I had an interesting conversation about this. She would have liked me to write a more conventional novel, she said, with dialogue between characters. But what I really enjoy is climbing inside different characters, something I borrowed from my previous professional life. So I decided I’d own this form, this monologue style, if you like.’
It was – and is – a process a long way removed from what had been her traditional way of working with comedy partner Jennifer Saunders across three decades on screen and stage. ‘Jen was always the one at the laptop; I was the walker-about-the-room.
‘But then part of that was because I’m not computer literate. I write my novels longhand in Pukka Pads with a pencil. Then someone types it up for me.’ So how did she know she could do it? ‘I didn’t and certainly not on my own. I’ve always worked with other people. Up until now, I’d never done a job that was completely solitary.
‘But, being alone in a room, with my own thoughts, being my own boss and writing 100,000 words or whatever, was a revelation. I’m a bit of a control freak and most of my life has involved compromise, so this new challenge rather appealed to me.’
Dawn and her comedy partner Jennifer Saunders in the new The Comic Strip Presents…
And there were no problems? ‘I can’t say that I didn’t encounter writer’s block, but I did sometimes have to go for a walk on the beach with the dog to try to solve an impasse.’
This latest book, Oh Dear Silvia, was intended to come out last year, but then Dawn spent three months making her TV comedy series, Roger & Val Have Just Got In. ‘I’d written about a third of the book by that stage and left it at a tidy point so it would be relatively simple, or so I thought, to pick it up on my return. In the event, I hated some of the things I’d written so there was quite a lot of revision needed until I got back into the swing of it.’
There was a further complication. Her adored mother, Roma, was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the beginning of the year. ‘She was a remarkable person,’ says Dawn. ‘She devoted so much of her life to trying to rehabilitate people with drug and alcohol problems. In fact, she had a hand in getting the law changed in regard to young women with these problems.
‘The first centre she set up was somewhere called Trevi House in Plymouth, dedicated to girls with very severe drug habits. The loophole in the system she identified – both legally and emotionally – was that the minute you were known to have a serious drug problem, your children were removed from you.
‘While I can kind of understand why, it meant that your recovery would be much slower. And you were only allowed to have your children back when you could prove you’d both kicked your habit and found yourself gainful employment. What my mother lobbied for was to keep the women and their children together.’
In time, Roma helped raise the money to buy an old MoD property, Hamoaze House in Devonport, near where Dawn was brought up. ‘It’s a beautiful building,’ she says, ‘which she had refurbished with a gym and a music room. There’s even a little school for children who have been marginalised because of drug problems in their family.’
As it happens, there was a happy by-blow for Dawn herself. Mark Bignell, 49, had been identified, some 20 years earlier, by Roma as someone she would one day wish to work with. ‘Biggs’ – as she calls him – ‘has done lots of things, but he’s a trained therapist who’s worked extensively with young people.’
A matter of months before Roma died, Dawn and Biggs fell in love. A shy smile crosses her face: ‘If I’m reluctant to talk about him,’ she says, ‘it’s because his work is very quiet and understated and it’s best it should remain like that. He didn’t ask to get caught up in my world and what it involves in terms of media scrutiny.’
But there’s little doubt he has become Dawn’s rock – she refers to him as her anchor in the dedication in her book Oh Dear Silvia. ‘He certainly supported me in writing the book. When I started it, I was in a very different frame of mind from when I finished it. All sorts of things happened to me, the most important of which was that I lost my mum in March of this year.
‘So there I was, writing a story whose central character is very gravely ill and then I found myself around someone who was very gravely ill.
‘Mum had lung cancer. She’d smoked 60 cigarettes a day throughout my childhood. When she was diagnosed, I asked – a difficult question, but I had to know – whether she regretted being a lifelong smoker.
‘She said: “Listen, it’s been my friend. I’m not a carouser. Smoking has been my comfort through all sorts of challenges, a steadying influence when things were difficult. I always knew I was going to lop off a few years because of it. So be it.”
‘Then I asked her if she’d want our children – mine and my brother’s – to smoke and she said: “Absolutely not.”
‘Mercifully, the end was very quick and handled entirely by her. She knew it was terminal and she didn’t really want any treatment.
‘Everyone was trying to persuade her to give it a try because it might give her a few more months. As it happened, they told her this on the Friday and she was dead by the following Thursday.’
At one point, Roma said a remarkable thing. ‘She suddenly piped up: “It’s win, win, Dawn.” She had lung cancer; she was going to die. In what possible way, I wondered, could that be win, win? “Well,” she replied, “either I stay here with you guys or I go and see Dad.” That was her belief.’
Dawn’s father, Denys, committed suicide aged 45 when Dawn was 19. Does she have a faith? ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do, although not quite as strong as Mum’s. She wasn’t a Christian, but she was a great believer in the afterlife. She was a very spiritual person, so I guess I’ve inherited a certain amount of that.’
Her loss apart, Dawn couldn’t be more content, she says. She lives in Fowey on Cornwall’s south coast in the house she and former husband Lenny Henry bought in 2006. ‘What’s not to like? I live in a place I love. I do a job I love. My best friend lives up the road. My daughter is here.’ (Billie is 21 now and works with horses.)
Dawn is much looking forward to Christmas. ‘We’ll all get together at my house – family and friends and Biggs and his family – although, for the first time ever, my mum won’t be there and that will be difficult. Lenny’s been there in the past, but, this year, I think he wants to be with his partner [producer Lisa Makin].
‘We remain good friends, but we parted three years ago so things have moved on for both of us. He was a massive part of my life. We were great friends during the divorce, which I now realise was far from being typical. We were very supportive of each other and the settlement was easy.
‘We had a strong marriage for 24-and-a-half years and then it got sticky for a few months. We’re no less fond of each other now but, on a practical level we have less to do with each other, except where it concerns Billie.’
So, she has a new guy, a new career and a new(ish) place to live. It seems as if she’s begun the second chapter of her life. ‘I have lots of happy memories of those earlier years. But, yes, life is a three-act play,’ says Dawn.
‘And I still have the third act to look forward to and that’s always the best, isn’t it?’
Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French is published by Michael Joseph, priced £18.99.
Dawn chooses to tell her story via a succession of monologues, some sad, some funny, some a poignant mix of both. Not that this is entirely new territory for one of Britain’s funniest women, albeit in a different genre. ‘I’d chosen to write my autobiography, Dear Fatty, in the form of letters. When it came to my first work of fiction, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, I decided to write it in diary form – again, internal, first-person thoughts.’
She resolved to do the same for this second work of fiction and met an immediate obstacle. ‘My editor and I had an interesting conversation about this. She would have liked me to write a more conventional novel, she said, with dialogue between characters. But what I really enjoy is climbing inside different characters, something I borrowed from my previous professional life. So I decided I’d own this form, this monologue style, if you like.’
It was – and is – a process a long way removed from what had been her traditional way of working with comedy partner Jennifer Saunders across three decades on screen and stage. ‘Jen was always the one at the laptop; I was the walker-about-the-room.
‘But then part of that was because I’m not computer literate. I write my novels longhand in Pukka Pads with a pencil. Then someone types it up for me.’ So how did she know she could do it? ‘I didn’t and certainly not on my own. I’ve always worked with other people. Up until now, I’d never done a job that was completely solitary.
‘But, being alone in a room, with my own thoughts, being my own boss and writing 100,000 words or whatever, was a revelation. I’m a bit of a control freak and most of my life has involved compromise, so this new challenge rather appealed to me.’
Dawn and her comedy partner Jennifer Saunders in the new The Comic Strip Presents…And there were no problems? ‘I can’t say that I didn’t encounter writer’s block, but I did sometimes have to go for a walk on the beach with the dog to try to solve an impasse.’
This latest book, Oh Dear Silvia, was intended to come out last year, but then Dawn spent three months making her TV comedy series, Roger & Val Have Just Got In. ‘I’d written about a third of the book by that stage and left it at a tidy point so it would be relatively simple, or so I thought, to pick it up on my return. In the event, I hated some of the things I’d written so there was quite a lot of revision needed until I got back into the swing of it.’
There was a further complication. Her adored mother, Roma, was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the beginning of the year. ‘She was a remarkable person,’ says Dawn. ‘She devoted so much of her life to trying to rehabilitate people with drug and alcohol problems. In fact, she had a hand in getting the law changed in regard to young women with these problems.
‘The first centre she set up was somewhere called Trevi House in Plymouth, dedicated to girls with very severe drug habits. The loophole in the system she identified – both legally and emotionally – was that the minute you were known to have a serious drug problem, your children were removed from you.
‘While I can kind of understand why, it meant that your recovery would be much slower. And you were only allowed to have your children back when you could prove you’d both kicked your habit and found yourself gainful employment. What my mother lobbied for was to keep the women and their children together.’
In time, Roma helped raise the money to buy an old MoD property, Hamoaze House in Devonport, near where Dawn was brought up. ‘It’s a beautiful building,’ she says, ‘which she had refurbished with a gym and a music room. There’s even a little school for children who have been marginalised because of drug problems in their family.’
As it happens, there was a happy by-blow for Dawn herself. Mark Bignell, 49, had been identified, some 20 years earlier, by Roma as someone she would one day wish to work with. ‘Biggs’ – as she calls him – ‘has done lots of things, but he’s a trained therapist who’s worked extensively with young people.’
A matter of months before Roma died, Dawn and Biggs fell in love. A shy smile crosses her face: ‘If I’m reluctant to talk about him,’ she says, ‘it’s because his work is very quiet and understated and it’s best it should remain like that. He didn’t ask to get caught up in my world and what it involves in terms of media scrutiny.’
But there’s little doubt he has become Dawn’s rock – she refers to him as her anchor in the dedication in her book Oh Dear Silvia. ‘He certainly supported me in writing the book. When I started it, I was in a very different frame of mind from when I finished it. All sorts of things happened to me, the most important of which was that I lost my mum in March of this year.
‘So there I was, writing a story whose central character is very gravely ill and then I found myself around someone who was very gravely ill.
‘Mum had lung cancer. She’d smoked 60 cigarettes a day throughout my childhood. When she was diagnosed, I asked – a difficult question, but I had to know – whether she regretted being a lifelong smoker.
‘She said: “Listen, it’s been my friend. I’m not a carouser. Smoking has been my comfort through all sorts of challenges, a steadying influence when things were difficult. I always knew I was going to lop off a few years because of it. So be it.”
‘Then I asked her if she’d want our children – mine and my brother’s – to smoke and she said: “Absolutely not.”
‘Mercifully, the end was very quick and handled entirely by her. She knew it was terminal and she didn’t really want any treatment.
‘Everyone was trying to persuade her to give it a try because it might give her a few more months. As it happened, they told her this on the Friday and she was dead by the following Thursday.’
At one point, Roma said a remarkable thing. ‘She suddenly piped up: “It’s win, win, Dawn.” She had lung cancer; she was going to die. In what possible way, I wondered, could that be win, win? “Well,” she replied, “either I stay here with you guys or I go and see Dad.” That was her belief.’
Dawn’s father, Denys, committed suicide aged 45 when Dawn was 19. Does she have a faith? ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do, although not quite as strong as Mum’s. She wasn’t a Christian, but she was a great believer in the afterlife. She was a very spiritual person, so I guess I’ve inherited a certain amount of that.’
Her loss apart, Dawn couldn’t be more content, she says. She lives in Fowey on Cornwall’s south coast in the house she and former husband Lenny Henry bought in 2006. ‘What’s not to like? I live in a place I love. I do a job I love. My best friend lives up the road. My daughter is here.’ (Billie is 21 now and works with horses.)
Dawn is much looking forward to Christmas. ‘We’ll all get together at my house – family and friends and Biggs and his family – although, for the first time ever, my mum won’t be there and that will be difficult. Lenny’s been there in the past, but, this year, I think he wants to be with his partner [producer Lisa Makin].
‘We remain good friends, but we parted three years ago so things have moved on for both of us. He was a massive part of my life. We were great friends during the divorce, which I now realise was far from being typical. We were very supportive of each other and the settlement was easy.
‘We had a strong marriage for 24-and-a-half years and then it got sticky for a few months. We’re no less fond of each other now but, on a practical level we have less to do with each other, except where it concerns Billie.’
So, she has a new guy, a new career and a new(ish) place to live. It seems as if she’s begun the second chapter of her life. ‘I have lots of happy memories of those earlier years. But, yes, life is a three-act play,’ says Dawn.
‘And I still have the third act to look forward to and that’s always the best, isn’t it?’
Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French is published by Michael Joseph, priced £18.99.