Jennifer Saunders

The thing I identify with Jennifer Saunders most about is a story Dawn French tells from the days when they were rooming together. Their house was burgled and tossed, and the police said that the worst of it was the room at the top. Which was the room Saunders had and which the thieves had not touched. I am not, by nature, a tidy person, and I feel that moment in my soul. I do so wish my children would get in on my current efforts to be better, though.

Saunders, like French, was an RAF brat. When she was six months old, the family moved to Cyprus, and they moved several more times in her childhood. She went to boarding school starting at age five. Her mother appears to have had very different goals for her than she had for herself; her mother filled out her application for the Central School of Speech and Drama, saying Saunders wanted to be a teacher. Her mother had wanted her to get an Oxbridge education. I can’t help wondering what her mother thought of what she did with her life.

Most people know her, of course, as Edina Monsoon, a name that is a play on a name her husband, Adrian Edmonson, has used. Edina of Absolutely Fabulous is a horrible, selfish, petty person, self-obsessed and frankly a lousy parent. She’s apparently based on a woman named Adriana Ivancich (it’s misspelled and therefore a broken link in Saunders’ Wikipedia article), a former lover of Hemingway’s, for whom Saunders worked when she spent a year as an au pair in Italy. It appears the show was developed in a tearing hurry based on a French and Saunders sketch and that French couldn’t costar because she was approved by an adoption agency at the same time.

Ab Fab gave Saunders a certain image. This is why she played Emily’s obnoxious stepmother on an episode of Friends, one assumes. When most people think of Jennifer Saunders, they think of a roaring snob, with or without reason to be so snobbish. Patsy and Edina are terrible people. They really are. They care more about drugs and fashion than anything else, and I read a suggestion that the reason they’re friends is that no one else would put up with them. I haven’t watched any of the more recent stuff, but what I have seen is Saffron counting the days until she doesn’t need to put up with her mother anymore.

Obviously, she’s had more of a career than just Edina. She’s in Muppet Treasure Island, if you’re not familiar with British comedy, playing Jim’s employer at the beginning. She teamed up with French in a certain stop-motion movie whose author was such a disappointment to us all. She wrote the script for the Spice Girls jukebox musical, of all things. She’s done a ton of British shows, writing several herself, and movies and written an autobiography and, with French, turned down an OBE. You almost certainly know who she is even if you didn’t know who she is.