SWEETIE, DARLING
SHE’S OLDER, WISER AND TAKING ON HER BIGGEST CHALLENGE YET − A DRAMATIC ROLE
Jennifer’s still simply Ab Fab!
Jennifer Saunders recently found her five-year-old grandson Bertie staring at her oddly. “I said, ‘Is there something wrong? What is it?’” Bertie kept looking at his grandmother, his gaze focused at a point just below her chin.
“Are you growing a beard?” Jennifer recounts he asked, breaking into laughter. “I had one little black hair here,” she points at the underside of her chin. “But I couldn’t see it. It made me laugh so much.”
At 61, Jennifer is strikingly gorgeous – chin fluff and all. She arrives at her Central London private members’ club with hair that looks tousled yet blow-dried, wearing trainers and a flappy jacket-cumcardigan that fashion journalists would call ‘artfully draped’.
It’s 1.30pm and the first thing she does is order a gin and tonic, which arrives in a giant fishbowl of a glass. “Oh lovely,” she says, taking a swig.
Her skin is so unlined and clear that, although it’s not normal to start an interview by rhapsodising about a woman’s epidermis, specifics of her routine are needed.
“I do as little as possible,” she says. “I have always used Clarins cleanser and toner and a light moisturiser… I think it’s just genes and luck. My grandmother had very good skin.”
Does she consider herself beautiful? “Oh.
Um. Not really. I’m always frustrated with various bits and bobs. I actually don’t worry about being older. It catches you by surprise sometimes. You know, you’re walking towards the mirror going, ‘There’s an old woman! Oh, it’s me.’”
Jennifer was 29 when she and her comedy partner Dawn French started their sketch show French and Saunders, which ran for 20 years on the BBC. Then, aged 34, she wrote and starred in the award-winning Absolutely Fabulous alongside Joanna Lumley, a blisteringly funny sitcom that was ranked the 17th greatest British TV show of all time by the British Film Institute (BFI) and spawned a movie in 2016.
Throughout it all, she was raising three daughters on a farm in Devon alongside her husband, comedian
Ade Edmondson (63).
“We had a nanny. Not a live-in... but we had lovely New Zealanders and an English girl who would come if none of us could do the school run, or who would be there in the day.
“But to be honest, in those days we could manage it. If I was on tour Ade would be at home, if he was doing a show, I’d be at home. So there was very rarely a time when one of us wasn’t there.”
Her three daughters – Ella, Beattie and Freya – are now 34, 32 and 29 respectively, with families, partners and homes of their own. These days, Jennifer finds she can say
yes to work whenever she feels like it. “I think, ‘Might as well have a go’ if it appeals because I’m not tied into anyone else’s calendar or schedule anymore.
“And as you get older things matter less. Not so much rides on it… Most of the time I do [work] now, I do it to have a great time and try something new.”
Her latest role in The Stranger is no exception. Jennifer is playing a non-comedic part in the new Netflix series for the first time in her professional life. Adapted from the psychological thriller by bestselling author Harlan Coben, a man’s world is shattered when a stranger tells him a secret about his wife.
So what was it like acting in a straight drama? “Well, it’s only difficult in prospect, not when you actually do it,” she muses.
But the seasoned actress does admit to nerves on her first day of filming, as she joined a cast that includes Downton Abbey’s Siobhan Finneran and Spooks star Richard Armitage.
“There was literally a point when I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m feeling a bit faint.’ I went,
‘No. Breathe. That’s what you’ve got to do, breathe.’
But everyone was just terrific and professional and lovely.”
She pauses, catching herself sounding too serious. “I mean,” she adds, sipping her gin, “you’re just aiming to try to look real and say the lines in a believable fashion.”
Apparently Harlan wrote her a letter, begging her to take the part. “Weirdly, he was an Ab Fab fan,” she says, shaking her head at the unlikely thought of a male writer of chilling mystery novels enjoying the travails of a booze-soaked PR maven and her promiscuous, drug-addled magazine editor friend.
But then Jennifer’s work has always had a broad appeal.
She was once listed as one of the 50 Funniest Acts in
Britain and was also named the 93rd Sexiest British Star by entertainment channel E! Plus, Good Housekeeping magazine put her at number 18 in its list of Best British Role Models.
Given she’s a funny, sexy role model, if she had to choose just one which would it be?
“I have no intention of being a role model or a sexy thing. I’d like to be a funny act.”
There’s another gift that age has given her and that’s the ability to speak her mind.
“You have the confidence to say to someone, ‘No, I think this is better.’ It’s the confidence to get what you want rather than what the consensus is.”
In the early days of writing
Ab Fab, she remembers being “pushed around by a lot of script editors at the BBC who told me this would work and that wouldn’t work and maybe she should have a dog…”
It was why Jennifer started handing scripts in late, because “if you deliver them ahead of time, everyone starts giving you notes… so you don’t control the sense of what is for yourself.”
Given there’s a lot of talk at the moment about imposter syndrome, is that something she feels as a comedian?
“No. I think you get to where you are and you deserve your place there. To be honest, if you can make people laugh, you hear it. You know it’s there.”
As a child, Jennifer and her three brothers moved around a lot. Her father, Robert, was a pilot in the RAF and her mother, Jane, a biology teacher, so the family were posted to different air bases around the world. Jennifer changed schools frequently and so the question begs to be asked, is that how she developed her comedic skills, as a way of making friends quickly and being accepted in each new place?
“No,” she says. “I don’t think I was ever a performer. I just detached myself. I never felt lonely. I was often more happy in my own company than with a big gang. I think it makes you clever at sussing out who to be with, and it sort of makes you good at being friends with quite a lot of people… just moving between the groups without necessarily making a huge fuss.
“I was always in a dream world. I used to love getting the bus to school because it meant you could just get into your own little daydream. The best thing was just being on your own.” So she’s an introvert?
“Yes. I think I’m more introvert than extrovert. I think as life goes on you cope with social situations better and I find I talk a lot more these days. I mean, 20 years ago I’d have jammed up by now,” she grins – she used to hate interviews.
“But as you get older you just get chattier.”
In fact, when Jennifer first met Dawn at the Central
School of Speech and Drama, where they were both students, Dawn found her aloof and uptight. Jennifer, for her part, had Dawn pigeonholed as “a cocky little upstart”.
Jennifer snorts when reminded of this. “Yeah. I probably was… I wasn’t particularly fussed about anything.”
Still, they managed to overcome their initial antipathy and became close – later forming a double act and joining the informal comedy collective The Comic Strip, which until that point had consisted of only male performers, one of whom was
‘There is a danger in thinking that life owes you, because it will come back and slap you in the face, always’
Ade. He and Jennifer were friends for six years before they became romantically involved.
The couple have now been married for 34 years and when asked what the secret is to staying together, she jokes that it’s “moving a lot” – the couple has two bases: The Devon farmhouse and a London pied-à-terre in Bayswater.
Jennifer’s favourite pastime is “shopping for houses on the internet without ever thinking
I’m going to move. I just go, ‘Ooh, that’s quite nice! I wonder what sort of life that would be…’ You know? I’ve sworn to Ade we’re not moving again.”
For someone with such a sharp sense of humour, Jennifer is far more gentle in person than anticipated, so as a couple, do they tend to avoid conflict?
“We do. I think compromise is one of the great things in life… just forget it, just move on. Ade loves stoicism. He’s a great stoic and reads a lot of books on it. I think it’s a fantastic thing.
“There’s this constant idea that we all deserve something. You know, ‘Oh, I deserve to be happy.’ Do you? I don’t think any of us deserve anything.
“I think we make our lives and we make them happy or sad, or things happen that make them that… There is a danger in thinking that life owes you, because it will come back and slap you in the face, always.’
When Jennifer was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 it was this attitude that saw her through. She underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy and experienced chemically induced menopause during treatment. But to hear her talk about it now, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a mild bout of the flu.
“My mother is very, ‘Just get on with it. Come on. Pull your socks up,’” she says.
“And the doctor is telling you, ‘It’s going to be fine, and here’s what we’re going to do.’ And you think, ‘All right, fine, here we go.’ And it becomes your job for about six months. You just do it, you get through it. The worst thing is coping with other people’s reaction. It is what it is. You get on with it. So your hair falls out! Worse things happen.”
But she was also helped through it by her female friends – she still fondly refers to Joanna as “me old mucker”, and she and Dawn are currently filming an adaptation of Death on the Nile, directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh.
“It’s lovely,” Jennifer says.
“I’m having the best time because a van picks us up – Dawn then me – and takes us into Longcross Studios [in Surrey, where they are filming]. It’s an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and we talk the whole way. Sometimes we repeat conversations we’ve enjoyed! We’ve had hours of travel and nonstop yak... It can be Michelle Visage on Strictly to personal problems… anything. Just yak, yak, yak.
“Female friendship is really important to me. I love my friends. Most of my life is spent with women and talking with women. I also have three daughters who I see a lot. I think women get on with women in a very untricky way and it’s not often presented like that.”
Why does she think that is? “It’s a way of keeping women down. And also to set women against each other. Of course there are rivalries − men have rivalries, everyone has rivalries − but most female friendships are incredibly supportive of each other.”
And that rings true, for an hour in her company has felt exactly like a gossipy, supportive catchup with a thoughtful friend.
“Bye, darling,” she says when we leave, having knocked back the last of her gin and tonic. As she would say: It’s been an extraordinary amount of fun.