Dawn French

Dawn French is a Welsh-English actress, comedian, and writer whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining late-20th and early-21st-century English TV-comedy roles — particularly her 1994–2007 lead role as the Reverend Geraldine Granger on BBC's vicar-comedy TV series The Vicar of Dibley and her 1987–2007 partnership with Jennifer Saunders in the BBC sketch-comedy TV series French and Saunders. She was born Dawn Roma French on October 11, 1957, in Holyhead, Anglesey, Wales, into an English Royal Air Force family. Her father Denys Vernon French was a Royal Air Force officer, and her mother Roma French was a homemaker. She and her older brother Gary French moved frequently across multiple British and overseas Royal Air Force bases across her childhood.

Her education at St Dunstan's Abbey School for Girls in Plymouth (1968–1976) and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London (B.A. in Speech and Drama, 1979) launched her early-career path. Her 1980 first stage performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland, launched her early-career English comedy public profile.

Her 1981 founding of the alternative-comedy duo French and Saunders with fellow Central School of Speech and Drama graduate Jennifer Saunders — and the subsequent 1987 launch of the BBC sketch-comedy TV series French and Saunders — launched her late-1980s English TV-comedy public profile. French and Saunders ran for 38 episodes across six series (1987–2007) and produced their 1990s and 2000s English TV-sketch-comedy public profile.

Her November 10, 1994 first-broadcast appearance as the Reverend Geraldine Granger on BBC's The Vicar of Dibley launched her 1990s and 2000s English TV-comedy public profile. The Vicar of Dibley ran for 25 episodes across three series and multiple specials (1994–2020) and was named the third-best British sitcom in a 2004 BBC poll. She married English actor Lenny Henry in 1984 (divorced 2010), and the couple has one adopted daughter. She married English charity executive Mark Bignell in 2013.

Her name Dawn derives from the Old English noun meaning "daybreak" or "the first light of morning." Dawn was a popular American girls' name through the 1970s.