For years, Jennifer Saunders’ silliness, zaniness and gleeful vulgarity has made her one of our most brilliant comedians. But now she finds herself doing ‘active acting’. She talks about postboxes, puzzling and why she couldn’t be happier
Within the space of just 10 minutes, Jennifer Saunders has shared three anecdotes, and rather than the stuff of the anecdotes themselves, it’s their balance – of glamour, glee and Britishness – that paints a distinct portrait of someone quite happy to dip into stardom and showbiz just so long as they’re home in time for tea. The first is about the night Roseanne Barr took Saunders and Joanna Lumley to meet an ageing Richard Pryor in a Los Angeles comedy club. The second is about the time Goldie Hawn flew her to New York to read a script Saunders was meant to have written, when Saunders had fully intended (but failed) to write the whole thing on the plane. And the third is about her current hobby, riding an electric bike through the Cornish lanes near her home, in search of interesting postboxes. “Yes, interesting postboxes.”
We’re sitting at right angles to each other, Saunders, at 64, elegant in cashmere and clompy boots, stroking a dignified whippet called Olive. The placing of the sofas is such that she is able to avoid looking directly at me, and I think this is how she likes it. Previous interviewers have sometimes described her as cold, but I get the impression instead that she is reserved, maybe a little shy, which I respect in a multi-award-winning movie star.
