French has been talked about in the British press for her body weight for decades, but there’s more to Dawn French weight loss than the media narrative shows. It’s probably no surprise to readers to learn that French became a public phenomenon thanks to her work as the eccentric Vicar of Dibley and her partnership with Jennifer Saunders on French and Saunders. While it’s been reported that the French weight loss is massive and was accompanied by a health scare in the mid-2010s, she’s also been just as vocal about combating the coverage of this process. Here’s what we do and don’t know about Dawn French’s body weight.
Who Is Dawn French?
Dawn French- comedian, actress, and writer- has managed what is unimaginable: an amalgam of them all. After working in comedy, TV, and theatre, the talented woman has now been at it for more than four decades. Dawn, born in Holyhead, Wales, on 11 th October 1957, has lived for most of her life in Cornwall, and it is, to this day, where she claims she feels most “at home”. She attended Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she first met Jennifer Saunders, and from here she took her talent forward, as would Jennifer for many years to come.
French became a recognized name in 1980s British comedy and an institution throughout most of that decade and the subsequent two decades for her role alongside Dawn French as one-half of French and Saunders, a BBC sketch show and the longest-running British comedy show. She further established herself as a name everyone could rely on as the sweet, wisecracking vicar Geraldine on The Vicar of Dibley from 1994-98 and through specials that extended the role well beyond her initial series. She also happens to have several best-selling fiction books and memoirs to her name.
Dawn French’s Career
Her career has tended to never be static for French. After French & Saunders cemented her place as one of the most recognizable UK comedy actresses for performing sketch, sitcom, film & in books, it’s arguably for her role as The Vicar of Dibley that she is best remembered. The character was researched by Dawn through consultation with a woman who was one of the first woman vicars in Joy Caroll & is attributed by many with having been pivotal to making the idea of woman vicars a more commonplace & accepted feature of church life.
Besides Dibley, French has worked on numerous TV shows and movies, such as getting back together with Jennifer Saunders in Death on the Nile; also, French is still an interview guest and appears on a special which would cover her partnership with Saunders and the past many years of working together. Not only that, scriptwriting took an important place in her work since French published a series of novels and an open biography that covers her life, her family, and how is her feeling towards her body shape.
And, more lately, French’s relevance has been discussed less for her writing than for other, slightly less significant public adjustments: In 2022, for example, it became news when she chose to cut her hair and embrace her grey. This seemed to amuse and intrigue many people.
What Is Known About Her Personal Life?
French married the comedian and broadcaster Lenny Henry in 1984. He filed for divorce in 2010. Together they adopted daughter Billie in 1991. Since 2013, French has been married to charity sector employee Mark Bignell.
She has not been shy in giving interviews and in her memoirs in describing her past upbringing, the suicide of her father when she was a teen, and the ups and downs of her life dealing with her own body, but has always put a boundary on revealing specifics in her personal life and on keeping details about her daughter out of the spotlight.
Dawn French Weight Loss Story: What Actually Happened
The clearest and most reliable reporting centres on 2014, when French was subjected to a fright over cancer, which led to her undergoing a hysterectomy. French has said her doctor had said that if she lost some weight beforehand, she would be able to get the surgery performed via keyhole, and experience three weeks’ recovery as opposed to three months through open surgery.
About then, French was half and a half; it was well-publicised at the time-a series of magazine articles celebrating her weight loss. French is characteristically unromantic in her description of what must have seemed to the media an astonishing makeover: “There wasn’t a magical element – what I call it is basically a grim discipline lasting several weeks which I describe with stark, unapologetic lack of romance as sticking to a low-calorie diet and walking a great deal”, the quote, which I widely report of her, read in her biography.
Some other sources place the beginning of her weight loss at an earlier point as well – apparently she shed the pounds starting in 2011 after she divorced from Lenny Henry; however, French has commented that her weight loss was fueled primarily by a need to get her health under control (and not by anything to do with the breakup). She has in the past emphasized that health issues are more of a concern past the age of 50.
These numbers need to be stated clearly as there is some ambiguity about exact figures, both about her largest weight at any given time and about exactly how much weight she lost. There are also some of the earlier figures, those recorded in the 2000s, that, apart from appearing in contemporary press, cannot be directly checked. However, it is the figure of seven-and-a-half stone reported following the hysterectomy in 2014 that is cited in several different reports.
Dawn French on Being Defined by Her Weight
In my opinion, this is arguably the more central part of the story, and is a point French has forcefully tried to emphasize. Interviewing her more recently, she directly attacks the idea that getting skinnier somehow changed her into a better person. French says she’s never disowned the bigger woman that she once was, and has rebuffed people who have claimed that after losing weight she looks “so much better” or just generally looks “well”, suggesting she does not wish the prior version of herself to be put down.
She has made a more general observation from her experience. She comments on the tendency of her friend, singer Alison Moyet, to only ever be referred to through her appearance instead of through her talent. French has also reflected on this as happening in the earlier part of her career. She remembered that while it was still the French and Saunders era her, together with Jennifer Saunders, was talked about in relation to her appearance; herself particularly.
She had then been ‘labeled the bigger one,’ where words like ‘running to fat’ or ‘plump’ were used, while never saying anything in relation to the appearance of men within the male comedy world. Her line of reasoning in this case is simple: she is any size that she happens to be and calls herself what she likes, but will not tolerate words said by the public in terms of language that she views as being used to ridicule her.
What Do Reliable Sources Confirm?
Tying the reporting together, a few things are confirmed: French definitely lost a very large amount of weight, generally estimated between seven and seven and a half stone, with the most attributable to prep work in relation to a planned hysterectomy that took place in 2014. She attributes the change in her physique to eating reduced-calorie meals and going for walks, rather than it being due to a specific dieting brand or surgical procedure involving weight loss-there are no reports of credible information suggesting that French has either had bariatric surgery or has been prescribed weight-loss medication.
What’s more of a matter of framing than substance is the media’s choice to cover it; French has explicitly complained about the narrative of “you look so much better now” that came with her subsequent weight loss, pointing out how that implicitly shames her previous self. Other aspects, such as what had been happening on the scale precisely before 2014, are from a more recent interview and not further corroborated, so are reported and not taken as factual.
Final Thoughts
The fundamentals of the weight loss stories relating to Dawn French are well-established: it was health-dictated and triggered before she was faced with major surgery, pursued through diet and walking, and has seen her shed some seven and a half stone. Hidden beyond all the before-and-after picture stories is French’s own constant refrain that this was not a story of redemption. She doesn’t see her heavier self as needing amending, and she believes that any female, comedic or otherwise, being reduced to talk of her physique misses who she really is.
