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| Birth Name(s) : Dawn Roma French |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
Lenny Henry |
| Profession:
N/A |
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Full Dawn French Biography
Dawn Roma French (born 11 October 1957) is a six-time BAFTA Award-nominated British comedian and actress best known for starring in her comedy sketch show French & Saunders along with her comedy partner Jennifer Saunders, and for playing the lead role in The Vicar of Dibley as Geraldine Granger.
French was born in Holyhead, Anglesey, Wales and educated at the independent St Dunstan's Abbey (now Plymouth College) boarding school on Craigie Drive in Plymouth, Devon, England. Her father, Denys, was a member of the Royal Air Force being stationed at RAF Valley. The RAF partly funded her private education but French did not enjoy her schooldays. She later won a debating scholarship that brought her to study at the Spence School in New York. There she met an Irish sailor called David White and was briefly engaged to him. French's confidence and self-belief stems from her father who told her how beautiful she was each day. He had a history of severe depression and attempted suicides but managed to conceal his illness from French and her brother. He committed suicide in 1977 when French was nineteen and he was forty-five, having left the RAF.
French has co-written and starred in her own successful comedy series French & Saunders with Jennifer Saunders, which debuted in 1987 and still airs sporadically to this day. On their show, the duo have spoofed many celebrities such as Madonna, Cher and Catherine Zeta-Jones and they have also parodied films in the series such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. After twenty years of them being on television together, their last sketch series, A Bucket o' French & Saunders, began airing on September 08, 2007.
However, French's biggest solo television role to date has been as the title figure in the long running and popular BBC comedy The Vicar of Dibley, created by Richard Curtis. She starred as Geraldine Granger, a vicar of a small village called Dibley. In the final full-length episode of the well-known series, 12.3 million people watched the episode to see her character's marriage ceremony. Her last appearance on The Vicar of Dibley was with Sting and Trudie Styler in a special mini episode made for Comic Relief in 2007. She was nominated for a BAFTA for "best comedy performance" in last episode of The Vicar of Dibley. Repeats of the show on BBC One still attract millions of viewers.
More recently, in 2006, French played a major role in Jam & Jerusalem as a woman called Rosie who had an alter ego. She co-starred alongside Sue Johnston, Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley. French also made a guest appearance in Little Britain as Vicky Pollard's mother Shelly Pollard, who was seen defending her daughter in the dock in Thailand as she was charged with drug smuggling, and was sentenced to twenty years, ten more than her daughter. French also appeared in a special version of Little Britain Live which featured several celebrity guests and was shown by the BBC as part of Comic Relief. She played the part of a lesbian barmaid in a sketch with Daffyd Thomas. In 2006, French also played a role in the television series Marple in the episode "Sleeping Murder".
In films, French has played The Fat Lady in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, replacing the less well-known actress, Elizabeth Spriggs, who played the character in the first film of the series. French's husband, Lenny Henry, provided the voice of the Shrunken Head in the same film, though they did not share any screen time together. In 2005 French provided the voice for the character Mrs. Beaver in Disney and Walden Media's film adaptation of C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
She has also taken to roles in the theatre. French has previously played roles in plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, My Brilliant Divorce and Smaller, which is a play about a schoolteacher caring for her disabled mother. January 2007 saw French performing as the Duchesse de Crackentorp in an opera in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. The opera production was The Daughter of the Regiment (La fille du régiment) by Gaetano Donizetti, which depicted the life of a baby adopted by an army regiment. French soprano Natalie Dessay and the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez took the roles which required singing.
It has recently being revealed that French believes that she will die young and intends to move to Cornwall so that she can spend the rest of her life there. French has not being diagnosed with any illness but strongly believes in her fate. She commented that her 50th birthday will be a landmark as she never thought she would live "to be very old". Her grandmother is ninety-nine and her mother is seventy-four, and there is no history of early death in her family. |
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