insideKENT Magazine Issue 29 - August 2014 | Page 27

We're sitting together in a Cornish hotel just up
the lane from her home on the coast. French is
56 and her dark hair frames a face that is quick
to break into a smile, giggle or full-hearted laugh.
Her knee-high boots are muddy, she explains,
because she’s just back from walking her dog
on the beach.
French spent much of her childhood in Cornwall
and moved back with her first husband, the
comedian Lenny Henry, in 2006. The tour though,
,
is nationwide and will take in over 60 gigs in two
stages. Talk of it both excites and seems to terrify
her. "I've just eaten a little bit of the cushion with
my bum thinking about it," she says. “I’ve always
wanted to [do it] and I think I’ve dodged it a bit.
Because I’m aware that it's a risk.”
French will be directed by Michael Grandage.
She was desperate to work with the man who
ran the Donmar Warehouse for a decade until
2012. “I could have asked Fatty Saunders, but
I thought, ‘I’m actually going to ask a proper
grown up theatre person'," she says. Eighteen
months have passed since she first approached
him, but she kept taking other jobs – a sign of
her being “scared” – including a role as a judge
on Australia’s Got Talent.

me now, is very comforting. “It’s a lovely thing to
do. We love tasting things. You don’t get to be
spherical without liking eating things.” I point out
that she isn’t spherical and she replies, “I’m less
than I was.” She takes no credit when I tell her
she’s beautiful. “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.”
When she was just 18, French’s father Denys
killed himself. Growing up, she and her brother
had been shielded from his depression. It was,
she says, "just like a bomb went off in our family.
My mum of course would have known there was
danger. He'd lived his whole life with [it 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 I think
it's been a centre point of my life, what happened
with my dad."

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."
Three years ago, French revealed that she had
lost seven and a half stone. She has since said
that she put some of it back on. Eating, she tells

"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." That's not
to say, though, that there isn't an element of
attention-seeking in performance. "I think it's the
child in us that is saying, 'Mum, Dad look at me.’
It's need for approval which I think all humans
have. But I think performers have it in a needy,
slightly sick way. I have had it and I have
understood it as that. 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 always see people in their nappies. Comedians,
actors, whatever," she says and laughs slightly.
“I see them as a baby going," and her voice turns
high-pitched and hysterical, "’Mummy look, look!'
And if I watch Simon Russell Beale, Mark R
ylance,
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 and Henry were divorced after 25 years
in 2010. They have an adopted daughter and
still have a "great" relationship. 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 fifties, going on dates. “I’m not good at flirting,
I’m not good at being coy. I can't do any of that
sh*t. Find it absurd and ridiculous. What I'd rather
do is give a questionnaire out and get people to
tick boxes," she says, laughing. “Speed dating
– that's what I should have done."

The show is called 30 Million Minutes – because
that’s roughly how long she's been alive – but
French still isn't quite sure what it is. Instead,
she makes a worried noise. "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 slideshow to
an extent. But not JUST a slideshow. 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." Her
grandmothers will also feature – ‘Good Granny’
and ‘Evil Granny’. Although Evil Granny did
actually steal from her, she knew the nickname
was a joke. “In fact she