Dawn French: first lady of laughter gets back on the road

When Dawn French was 13 she went to her first disco. The year was 1971 and she was wearing a pair of fashionable purple suede hotpants bought expressly for the purpose. Putting them on and examining herself in the mirror, her veneer of confidence was shaded by adolescent self-consciousness.

Sensing his daughter's anxiety as she came downstairs, French's father, Denys, sat her down on the sofa. "He gave me a little chat about how valuable I was to him and to the family," she recalled in an interview last month, "and he told me to remember that I'm beautiful and I deserve the best." It was perfect timing, she added, as her confidence was fragile "but he gave me armour and I've worn that armour ever since".

For more than 30 years, French's armour has been a combination of comedy and confidence. After drama college in the late 1970s and a stint on the standup circuit with her long-time collaborator, Jennifer Saunders, French first appeared on television in 1982 in Channel 4's cult hit Comic Strip series. It was clear from the start that French was a genuine talent. She was one of the few female comics on British screens at the time, holding her own in the testosterone-dominated world of alternative comedy.

But she was refreshing in other ways too: a big woman who had the self-assuredness to be big without apology, without making herself smaller or shrinking away from the limelight as if she didn't deserve it. Her father's advice – and the spectre of those purple hotpants – had seen her through.

By 2007, she was attracting an audience of 12.3 million in the BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. That same year, French received a £1.5m advance for her commercially acclaimed memoir, Dear Fatty, and since then has followed up with two bestselling novels.

At 56, French seems to have it made. She lives in a spectacular £2.3m seafront house in the picturesque Cornish town of Fowey with her second husband, charity chief executive Mark Bignell. She is on amicable terms with her ex, comedian Lenny Henry, with whom she raised their adopted daughter, Billie, who is now in her early 20s. Her books and her television career have left her with a sizable fortune and substantial critical acclaim. She was awarded a Bafta fellowship in 2009 and was last year included on a list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the UK drawn up by Radio 4's Woman's Hour.

And yet, far from opting for the quiet, comfortable life of a lady novelist in Cornwall (she once described writing fiction as her "passion"), French has just embarked on her first solo tour. 30 Million Minutes – so-called because this is the about how long she has been alive – marks her return to the stage for the first time in six years and is directed by Michael Grandage, the former artistic director of the Donmar. It will see her perform 38 dates across the UK and Ireland.

French has been adamant that the show "isn't standup", but a deeply personal account of her life, alternately moving and hilarious and shot through with anecdote, slideshows and family photographs. "Unlike a lot of famous people, Dawn is the kind of person who is just naturally honest about herself," says an acquaintance. "I think someone once said she would march up to the elephant in the room and shake it firmly by the trunk and that's it exactly."

For French, the prospect of a solo tour was "a bit frightening and that's why I wanted to do it… It's basically me examining what it is to be a person".

Her new material leaves little to the imagination – in one extended monologue, she reveals that she likes to call her breasts "Ant and Dec" and refers to her vagina as "Mumford and Sons". She also talks about a uterine cancer scare three years ago that led to a seven-and-a-half stone weight loss and a hysterectomy.

The first performance of 30 Million Minutes was in Sheffield last Thursday and was greeted with near-universal praise. The Guardian called it "high-concept public atonement… brutally unsparing" and concluded: "The show proves there's tragedy at the core of French's amiable, roly-poly persona."

It is true that, of late, French has shown herself more open to exploring deeper themes. Her novels do not shy away from uncomfortable topics – one interviewer said her first novel was "as chilling as anything I have read in years" and her second, Oh Dear Silvia, centres around a woman in a coma and the conversations people have around her bedside.

In truth, there has always been a darker side to French. She was born in Holyhead, Wales, to English parents – Denys, who worked as a corporal technician for the RAF, and Felicity, who was known as "Roma". Her father's job meant that the family moved every 18 months or so and at the age of 12, both Dawn and her older brother, Gary, were sent to boarding school. French became a weekly boarder at St Dunstan's Abbey in Plymouth, spending the weekend with her grandparents who ran a newsagent's in the town.

She has frequently referred to her childhood as happy and stable, but beneath the surface, things were difficult. Unbeknown to his children, Denys had suffered from severe depression since his teenage years. As a child, the most French knew of this was that her father occasionally suffered from headaches and had to have a lie-down.

But in September 1977, when French was 19, her father committed suicide by gassing himself in his car.

French had just returned from a year's scholarship study in New York after winning an English-Speaking Union debating competition.

"I think there's always a sense of absence," she has said of her father's sudden death. "But it's not something you can't survive. It's just like something you carry round in your knapsack – at least, that's how I look at it."

Within weeks, French was due to start her degree at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Her mother, she recalled, "didn't want me to stay at home and so I went and pretended to be happy. And it made me happy. It's a little bit of pretence that then sticks."

It was at Central that French met Saunders. The two of them would go on to become one of Britain's best-loved comedy duos. Their hit BBC series, French and Saunders, was one of the most popular sketch shows in the late 1980s and 90s and satirised everything from Madonna to the 1962 film, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Saunders has a theory about why French is so funny – because she has the best deadpan face.  

In 1984, French married fellow comedian Lenny Henry. They were a mixed-race couple at a time in Britain when such a thing was still relatively rare and they were subject to racist attacks – excrement was left on their doorstep, swastikas were daubed on the walls and, on one occasion, a burning, oil-soaked rag was posted through the letter box.

After several unsuccessful rounds of IVF and a miscarriage, the couple adopted their baby daughter in 1991. For 26 years, French and Henry seemed to be one of the most solid marriages in showbusiness, but they divorced amid tabloid allegations of his infidelity.

The separation was managed with a remarkable absence of animosity or blame – and French recently spoke to her ex-husband to see whether he would mind her talking about their relationship in 30 Million Minutes. Henry told her to go ahead.

She also tackles her father's suicide on stage – a subject so raw that even when it came to recording the audiobook version of her 2008 memoir, she had to ask someone else to speak the relevant passages.

In rehearsals for the stage show, she had difficulty getting through this sequence without breaking down. On the first night in Sheffield, according to one reviewer, French at last found "the guts to voice her devotion and devastation".

The armour is still in place, but Dawn French has, it seems, chosen to show us some of the chinks. It might be her bravest – and boldest – move yet.