DAWN
FRENCH

Dawn French’s comedy often depends on the pleasure of watching people try to carry on as normal when normality has already escaped them. Born in Holyhead, Wales, on October 11, 1957, she trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she met Jennifer Saunders. Their work at the Comic Strip led into television, and French and Saunders began its own BBC sketch series in 1987. The partnership made room for elaborate parodies as well as the comic uncertainty of two people trying to perform together.

The Vicar of Dibley, which began in 1994, gave French the enduring role of Geraldine Granger, a female vicar arriving in a village unprepared for her. Much of the comedy grows from the distance between Geraldine’s openness and the habits of the parish council. French makes room for impatience and appetite within a character whose care for other people remains believable. That combination helps explain why a familiar encounter in the village can still carry emotional weight after the joke has landed.

Film audiences may also recognise her through a voice. She voiced Mrs Beaver in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), and Miss Forcible in the English-language cast of Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009). Saunders voices Miss Spink in the latter, bringing the long-standing partnership into a stop-motion neighbourhood. These performances offer a useful way to listen to French’s timing: emphasis, a pause and the texture of a reply can establish a personality even when the familiar performer is absent from the image.

French and Saunders received the BAFTA Fellowship together on April 26, 2009, recognising their contribution to television. French’s writing has also developed beyond scripts. Her memoir Dear Fatty appeared in 2008; her novel Because of You was published in 2020 and longlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Taken together, the books and screen work invite attention to how she moves between a comic exchange shared with another performer and a story sustained on the page.

In the 2026 sitcom Can You Keep a Secret?, French plays Debbie opposite Mark Heap as her husband William. The premise turns a mistaken declaration of death into an insurance deception and a family secret. It provides another setting for her interest in people who treat an extraordinary decision as manageable domestic business. Following this role alongside Geraldine is a way of seeing how her warmth can coexist with a character’s capacity to take charge, rationalise a bad choice and keep the conversation moving.