Dawn French shares her feelings about fat, family and her new solo show. Katherine MacAlister finds out more

Tonight, when Dawn French comes to Oxford with her solo show 30 Million Minutes, she will step into the unknown. Alone, without her famous friend and comedy partner Jennifer Saunders, she will also buck the trend by talking about her own life and getting a few things off her chest.

Understandably apprehensive, she is determined to see it through: “I've just eaten a little bit of the cushion with my bum thinking about it,” she says, “but I’ve always wanted to do a solo show. I’ve just dodged it a bit until now because I’m aware it’s a risk. I need to own it and be very strong and confident about that.”

That 30 Million Minutes is part autobiographical, more of ‘an evening with’ than stand-up, supports this. Perhaps at 56 French has decided now is the time? Perhaps, having survived a very public divorce with her equally famous comedian husband of 25 years Lenny Henry, she needed to do something a bit different? Perhaps, having found new happiness with husband number two Mark Bignell she’s finally found the confidence? Either way this is a massive departure for one of the UKs favourite comediennes.

Called 30 Million Minutes (because that’s roughly how long she’s been alive), French is still unsure how to define the show. Frowning, she says:. “It’s not a stand-up show. It’s not a play.

“I guess it is a monologue because it’s just me talking. It’s a slide show to an extent. But not JUST a slide show. It’s not like your awful, most feared auntie who's just come back from Egypt where you have to sit and watch everything. It's quite autobiographical, so I show you the people that have made me - so to speak. There's quite a lot about my mum and dad."

It’s easy to look at Dawn’s life, her idyllic house in Cornwall, her new marriage, success, work, awards, fame and fortune, and presume that we already know her. We sometimes assume she’s always been this bubbly, happy person and that life has always been rosy. But loss and sadness erupted into Dawn’s life in a catastrophic way; French’s father Denys killing himself when she was just 18 “It was”, Dawn says, “just like a bomb went off in our family. My mum of course knew there was danger. He’d lived his whole life with depression but this was in a time when you didn’t say you had mental illness if you were the head of a family.

“I still have sadness about it. Massive sadness. And it’s been a centre point of my life, what happened with my dad.”

Soon after her father’s suicide, French started at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London on a teaching course where she met Jennifer Saunders, with whom she formed the comedy double act. The pair made names for themselves on the alternative scene in the 1980s and their long-running TV show, French and Saunders, launched in 1987. TV roles — including the lead in The Vicar of Dibley — and in the theatre followed. Now, with an autobiography and two novels to her name, Dawn is about to test herself again.

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So why go solo? “I could have asked Fatty Saunders, but I thought, ‘I’m going to ask a proper grown up theatre person’,” she laughs, choosing instead Michael Grandage, the man who ran the Donmar Warehouse until 2012, who persuaded French that it’s OK to talk about herself. “It’s a little bit, ‘Aren’t I interesting?’ I keep saying to Michael ‘I need to take this out,’ and he says, ‘Absolutely not - that's the WHOLE point. Do NOT push it away from you, so that’s what I’ve done.”

“That’s not to say, though, there isn’t an element of attention-seeking in performance,” she adds hastily. “I think it’s the child in us that is saying, ‘Mum, Dad look at me!’ It’s a need for approval which all humans have.

“But I think performers have it in a needy, slightly sick way. I don’t think you can get up and do arsing about like I do without a bit of that going on, but I find it very unattractive — in myself and in other people. I see them as babies going [voice turns high-pitched] “Mummy look, look!' And yet if I watch Simon Russell Beale, Mark Rylance, Judi Dench, people who inhabit their characters properly, I don’t see them in a nappy. I watch their character and that’s that.”

French was born in Holyhead, Wales in 1957 where her father was stationed in the RAF, but spent much of her childhood in Cornwall and went to boarding school in Devon. At home, French was a performer and her dad was too. “He would tease me to discipline me. Very loving teasing. Lots of things were dealt with at that quite sophisticated level of lots of fun.”

French’s father gave her confidence and she remembers a “key moment” when she was leaving for a party. “I’ve always been a big girl and shouldn't really have been wearing hot pants,” she says. Her father, though, was supportive. “He told me I was completely beautiful and how amazing I looked in them and that I would get loads of attention. So my dad gave me a sort of telling off that was about totally infusing me with confidence and I went on cloud nine to this party and I’ve actually never left that party. It was armour.”

Seemingly happy in her skin, French then lost 7.5 stone three years ago, but has put some of it back on, admitting she finds eating very comforting. “It’s a lovely thing to do. We love tasting things. But I suppose if you get very fat like I did you might be choosing to destroy some good stuff you’ve been given in terms of your health. That’s something you can address,” she says cheerfully.

Maybe she just lost weight when she fell in love again, having just celebrated her first wedding anniversary with Mark: “It’s so new. It’s thrilling. It’s almost too delightful. I could almost burst with it,” she says.

Managing to maintain a “great” relationship with Lenny with whom she has an adopted daughter Billy, he is, she says, “a good man” and they had “a very good marriage for a very long time until it went a bit dodgy at the end”.

After their split, French found herself, in her 50s, going on dates. “I’m not good at flirting, at being coy. I can’t do any of that sh*t. Find it absurd and ridiculous. What I’d rather is give a questionnaire out and get people to tick boxes,” she giggles. “Speed dating — that’s what I should have done.”

But that would be to underestimate her, because Dawn French has always loved a challenge, hence the show: “I’ve got things to say, thought it could be fun and I haven’t done it before,” she says, pausing only to add: “but I don’t need loads of positive strokes for just being alive. What I want is people to turn up and see whether what I’ve written works,” she says.

There’s a reason why she’s still in the business, 30 years on.

30 Million Minutes
New Theatre, Oxford
Tonight
Tickets: Call 0844 871 3020 or visit www.atgtickets.com/oxford