Dawn French

She’s credited with sharing the original idea for Absolutely Fabulous, even though she only had one appearance on it. I’m not sure what the back story is there; her frequent comedic partner Jennifer Saunders—we’ll get to Saunders—is its writer and star. They didn’t always work together, though they’ve done sketch comedy on TV together frequently, making nearly fifty episodes of French and Saunders over thirty years. Which may not sound like much until you think, you know, British television seasons, not American.

Honestly I can’t imagine how important that friendship was to French. French grew up attending boarding schools where she apparently never felt comfortable. Her father was in the RAF, and the family moved around a lot. She apparently frequently stayed with her grandparents on the weekend. However, while she was at home, her father told her every day that he loved her and that she was beautiful. And then, when French was nineteen, her father succumbed to a long history of depression.

While she and Saunders didn’t initially get along, it seems clear that their comedy styles meshed fully. They were flatmates, and the others in the flat convinced them to work together. French says some of their early work was desperately cringeworthy, but I don’t know how much that was about them and how much it was about, you know, being college students in the late ‘70s. Even students at the Royal Center School for Speech and Drama are just going to be cringe. It’s always the fashion.

The pair do appear to have been the token women of the ‘80s British comedy scene. They literally answered an ad for female comics to become part of The Comic Strip, which led to a TV debut in The Comic Strip Presents. But French was one of the frequent writers on the show. They’ve been paired on television and in movies—including in a stop-motion version that I’m just not going to be able to watch any time soon that isn’t the only thing French has done by an author I’m no longer interested in.

Of course, Vicar of Dibley fans are screaming at me about her work done without Saunders. And she’s done quite a lot without Saunders. She’s written autobiographies and novels. She’s done TV, movies, and the legitimate theatre. And advertising. And charity work, fighting against female genital mutilation and supporting body positivity, including a line of clothing and two books of knitting patterns for plus-sized women. And she’s declined an OBE. Quite the woman.