DAWN FRENCH “I always just wanted to be happy”

In a powerful interview, Dawn French talks to Alice Bedford about motherhood, marriage, losing her parents and the joy of working with best pal Jennifer Saunders on the new film version of Death on the Nile.

- Alice Bedford

Dawn French lets out a throaty hoot of laughter as she describes her latest project, which will reunite her and comedy partner Jennifer Saunders on screen for the first time in three years. The award-winning stars were cast by the legendary actor and director Kenneth Branagh to star in a multimillion-dollar movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile – a move which Dawn admits “came as something of a shock” to both of them.

“Well it’s the great Kenneth Branagh, isn’t it?” she says, settling into a comfy armchair for a chat. “And it’s a very big-budget serious movie, so to put Jennifer and I in as a sort of double act was very brave of him. We were worried – on his behalf – that by having the two of us, it would suddenly seem like a comedy parody. But he was completely insistent we could do it.”

In the movie – which stars Kenneth as the famous Belgian detective Hercules Poirot, along with Hollywood actress Annette Bening and Da Vinci’s Demons star Tom Bateman – Dawn and Jennifer reprise the roles made famous by Bette Davis and Dame Maggie Smith in the 1978 version of the crime thriller, which is set in the glamorous ’30s.

Jennifer plays the spiky, wealthy American socialite and kleptomaniac Marie Van Schuyler, while Dawn takes on the role of her nurse Mrs Bowers, who is more than a match for her companion. She laughs, “We wanted to do it really well for Ken. He’s quite strict, so you really have to raise your game, to know all your lines, to have thought through every move and every action.