Dawn French plays liking people as a decision, taken on screen and visibly costing something. Beside Jennifer Saunders it made her the warmer half of a double act that has lasted thirty years; alone, it kept The Vicar of Dibley funny and kind for thirteen.
Fi1m perspective
Watch her in a studio with Jennifer Saunders. Saunders wants to get on with the sketch; French wants to talk about something else first, and the something else is usually where the laugh is. Put her on her own in The Vicar of Dibley and the same habit turns into patience. Geraldine Granger is surrounded by people who would try anyone, and French lets us see both the exasperation and the decision, made fresh each week, to stay friendly. Most comic actors play the joke. She plays the person who has chosen to put up with it.
The partnership began at the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1977, went through the Comic Strip club and The Comic Strip Presents... (1982), and became French and Saunders in 1987: films everybody had seen, done slightly wrong, in costumes that cost too much, with a straight face. The original idea for Absolutely Fabulous (1992) was hers, though Saunders built the series. She went solo with Murder Most Horrid (1991), playing murderer, victim or both, and then The Vicar of Dibley (1994), which ran until 2007 and is the role she will be remembered for. Since then there has been voice work, the stage and novels.
Dibley is where the case for her rests. Richard Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer wrote her a village and she kept turning up for it. She has said she wanted Geraldine to have an accent and a different look, and that Curtis told her to "wear Geraldine like a good-fitting jacket, bring her really close to you". He was right. We laughed, more than we expected to, at the work she puts into staying civil: the irritation is all over her face, so is the decision underneath it, and the gap between the two is the performance. It leaves room for other people, too. Emma Chambers is funniest beside her because nobody is hurrying her towards the joke.
The usual complaint is that Dibley is bland next to the sharper sitcoms of its day, and that her solo work lost the edge of the alternative comedy she came from. Half of that is fair. The jokes do become familiar and the writing leans on our fondness for the villagers. But she is the reason the village never becomes contemptible. Coraline (2009) gives her and Saunders less to do than the casting promises; the film has moved on to its next oddity before it uses them. 300 Years of French & Saunders (2017) is fonder and baggier, and some of its parodies feel like two people who have been told what is on television rather than having watched it. She is as quick as she ever was in it, and the closing Poldark sketch is as good as anything from their prime. The material was the problem, not her.
A new sitcom, Can You Keep a Secret?, is due in 2026. We would like it to give her someone to be rude to.
Biography
Dawn French is a British actress, comedian and writer. Born in Holyhead, Wales, she trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she met Jennifer Saunders.
She is best known for creating and starring in the BBC sketch series French and Saunders (1987–2007) with Saunders, and for playing Geraldine Granger in the sitcom The Vicar of Dibley (1994–2007). She created Absolutely Fabulous and appeared in it as Kathy. French has been nominated for seven BAFTA TV Awards and received a BAFTA Fellowship with Saunders in 2009.
Her film roles include the Fat Lady in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Mrs Beaver in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), and Miss Miriam Forcible in Coraline (2009). She later appeared in Death on the Nile (2022).
