Dawn French said she wrote to Lenny Henry in her autobiography after reacting to a biography about her that she called a “very weird experience.” The actor and author said the book helped her answer it on her own terms, after she felt the other version misrepresented her and hurt her family.
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French said, “I wrote an autobiography lots of years ago. And the reason I did that is because somebody else wrote a biography of me and that was a very weird experience.” She added, “I felt like being bullied because somebody I don’t know, a pretty bad writer actually…got a huge amount to write my story.”
She said, “This book was out there with all these lies about me and kind of mispresenting me on important things in my life and hurting my family.” A publisher then told her, “what you need to do is your book, your story.” That pushed her into a format that gave her control over tone, memory, and emphasis instead of leaving those choices to someone else.
Letters to family and friends
French said she wrote the autobiography as a series of letters. “I wrote to people in my life,” she said, naming her father, her mother, Jennifer Saunders, her best friend, David Cassidy, the Beatles, and Lenny Henry. She added, “Some of them were just comedy. Some of them were heartfelt.”
That structure did more than create variety. It let her mix the private and the comic in the same book, which is not how a standard memoir usually works. She said, “I wrote to people that I loved, my beloveds and people that I admired.”
Dawn French and Lenny Henry
French’s letter to Lenny Henry lands in the middle of a split that had already settled into a working friendship. She and Henry were married for over 25 years before announcing their amicable separation in 2010, and she later said, “Remarkably, we seem to have shifted with relative ease from a 25-year marriage to a lasting friendship.”
She was even blunter about the absence of ongoing conflict: “I am amazed by us – there is no war, we’ve turned out to be the best of friends.” That makes the Lenny Henry letter feel less like a rupture than a record of how she chose to write about the people who still mattered to her after the marriage ended.
French is due to appear on Saturday Kitchen Live on Saturday, June 20 from 10am on One. If she keeps talking the way she did here, the useful question is not whether she will revisit the biography again, but which version of the story she wanted readers to keep.
