Meet the Author
Lenny Henry Rising To The Surface, Faber, £20
He is a big man, with big laughs and a big heart to match. But there is a serious side to comedian, actor and Comic Relief co-founder Sir Lenny Henry.The impressionist, who started his career on TV talent show New Faces when he was just 16, launched the “Red Nose” charity in 1985 in response to the famine in Ethiopia. Nearly four decades on and he is its honorary president and is still wooing stage and TV audiences.
The 64-year-old, 6ft 3in gentle giant is playing Sadoc Burrows in Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings prequel series,The Rings Of Power, starting on September 2.And, more poignantly, he has written and will be starring in Three Little Birds, a new ITV immigration drama inspired by his mother, about three women travelling from Jamaica to Britain in 1956 to start a new life.
Henry admits her tough love and work ethic shaped him.And he reveals his greatest regret was not to have been at her side when she passed away. Speaking on the launch this week of the second volume of his memoirs, Rising To The Surface, a book that traces his career through the 80s and 90s, and relives the traumatic death of his mother,Winifred, in 1998, he says:“I was literally howling with rage because I could have been there.”
He was on tour in Australia at the time but a doctor in the UK had told him she would be okay in his absence. He recalls.“It was awful, the worst I’ve ever felt through anything.”
Henry – previously married to comedian and actress Dawn French with whom he has a daughter, Billie – is the son of Jamaican immigrants and today lives in Oxfordshire with his long-term partner, theatre producer Lisa Makin. He says his upbringing drove him.“I come from a working-class family and I saw my mum doing four jobs to put food on the table and (buy) clothes for her seven kids and grandchildren.”
He inherited her relentless work ethic but admits:“I took that into the business, sometimes to the risk of my mental health.”
In moving chapters, he talks candidly about her health deterioration from 1991, the intimate chats they had about his upbringing. His mother had beat him as a child and they had a chance to talk that through. He reveals:“She had the mentality of,‘If I don’t toughen you up, nobody else will’.That, and seeing how hard she worked to help us, was the shaping of me.”
He had grief counselling after her death and cognitive therapy that continued for four years. And work provided some solace. He says:“I also did a long tour of Britain and Australia, talking about mum and doing her voice and remembering her and it was kind of a homage to her, which was good for my mental health.”
The memoir charts Henry’s success with the sketch shows Three Of A Kind and The Lenny Henry Show to winning the Golden Rose of Montreux, his creation of hilarious characters like Delbert Wilkins and Theophilus P.Wildebeeste, and starring in his own sitcom, Chef, and the setting-up of his production company. But he is tight-lipped about his relationship with French.
While comedy remains his first love, he has long since reinvented himself as a serious actor, received dazzling reviews in the title role of Othello and did stints at the RSC, as well as TV appearances in Broadchurch and Doctor Who.
Will he relax his work pace? He smiles:“Actually, now I’m starting to think,‘No, slow down, what’s the hurry? Take your time.”