of the play was Sheridan.
Perhaps her examiners saw through the bluff – this was the Central School of Speech & Drama, after all, the UK’s most prestigious drama school, so they probably would have realised that Jennifer was winging it. But they were sufficiently impressed by her exam results – you needed only one A-level to get in – and her improvisation routine – with a broom – to accept Jennifer. She was in.
Many of theatre’s and television’s greatest names have trained at Central. Judi Dench, Sir Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, Lindsay Duncan, Rupert Everett and Kristin Scott Thomas all studied their craft there. So she was following in the footsteps of the great and the good.
But there was no grand plan, no ambition, no overwhelming desire to forge a career in show business or to act on the stage. The three-year drama teaching course just seemed like a good idea at the time and a chance to live in London – far more exciting to a 19-year-old girl than the prospect of quiet rural life in Cheshire. And it would turn out to be exciting. But not in any way Jennifer or anyone who knew her would ever have imagined…
The Central School of Speech & Drama is located on the border of Swiss Cottage and Belsize Park, north London, just off the traffic-clogged streets of Finchley Road and on the site of the old Embassy Theatre.
Today, it directly faces a streamlined, ultra-modern, sprawling community area complete with library, gym complex and the prestigious Hampstead Theatre. The houses in the surrounding streets are expensive and very upmarket: not much change from half a million pounds just for a small flat.
But back then, in 1977, the area itself was totally different: quite scruffy, large but very shabby and rundown nineteenth-century villas and houses alongside post-war blocks of local authority flats and concrete high rises.
Students at Central who shared the mostly grotty flats in the peeling stucco houses in the area were likely to be living with mice, ever-complaining ancient landladies, toilets on the landing and kitchens boasting a bath – with a lid on it. The Thatcherite property renovation frenzy that took over London in the 1980s was still in the future.
And those students, like Jennifer, who were starting their drama teaching course that year, in the class called T80, were a mixed bag: mostly quite young, out to have fun above all else, all sorts of backgrounds.
The course itself was quite new. And the drama teaching students were very much seen as the ‘poor relations’ to the more exalted drama students on the acting course, who mostly ignored the teaching students’ very existence. Boys wore tights and ballet shoes. Girls were issued with a regulation black leotard, thick black tights and a full-length practice skirt to wear in rehearsals and dance classes.
The routine at T80 was 9am to 5pm five days a week, something that Jennifer initially struggled to keep up with.
‘Some days I would cycle to school, get there too late and then just ride home again. I couldn’t quite get into gear for about a year,’ she said of those Central days.
For the drama teaching students, there was a busy schedule. Each day consisted of classes for voice, movement, teaching of drama and poetry, and regular sessions where students learned more about stagecraft, skills such as building sets or making costumes. And, of course, there was teaching practice. And this bit came as a huge surprise to Jennifer, who, for some reason, hadn’t actually taken on board the fact that the course was aimed at… training teachers of drama.
‘It was a shock when I discovered I’d been put on a teaching course. It never occurred to me they’d eventually throw me into a school with real children,’ she recalled.
But it was in the daily movement class, in the autumn of 1977, in the school’s big training room-cum-studio with its huge mirrors and barres along the walls, when fate stepped in for Jennifer in that first year at college.
The new teaching students, all shapes and sizes, clad in the most unforgiving garment known to man – the black leotard – were reluctantly going through their paces doing warm-ups, exercises, swinging their legs, when a new 19-year-old girl stepped into the class, a couple of days late and, unlike Jennifer, desperately keen on the idea of learning how to be a drama teacher.
Enter Dawn French, nervous that she had missed the all-important first bit, the initial ‘bonding’ sessions that usually take place at the beginning of a study course.
In the time-honoured fashion, Jennifer and Dawn checked each other out while struggling to bend, stretch and follow the warm-up exercises. Jennifer, always swift to spot comic potential, seemed rather amused at the ridiculousness of all this ‘movement’ and didn’t manage to hide her feelings. No grins were exchanged or serious eye contact made directly between the two girls. They didn’t ‘connect’ instantly. Not at all. And certain assumptions were made when they chatted briefly afterwards. These assumptions proved to be totally incorrect, of course. But it definitely wasn’t love at first sight.
According to Dawn French, this mutual disinterest was mostly down to her own insecurities – and their shared RAF childhoods.
‘I liked the look of Jennifer. But she seemed far too confident and intimidating for me,’ remembered Dawn in an interview with the Daily Mail.
‘I arrived after term had started because my dad had just died. People had already started to get their little groups together and Jen was part of quite a confident group of posh girls and it was difficult for me to fit in.
‘Both our fathers were in the RAF but Jen’s dad was an officer and my dad wasn’t. Jen was the epitome of the upper-middle-class girl whereas I was upper working-class. I was slightly intimidated by posh people – and I thought that officers and their children were posh people. Now I recognise that’s a foolish thing. Rank delineates in the Forces and it takes you a lifetime to get over it. It ultimately doesn’t matter but it was a big part of my childhood: you were constantly told where you belonged.’
To Jennifer, Dawn French was a stout, bossy person, horribly keen on being a drama teacher: ‘I didn’t take the course seriously and she did. I think she was the only person on the course who really wanted to be one, so that was a bit of a barrier between us.
‘And she annoyed me greatly: she was very outgoing and popular, just back from a year in New York. And I was quite quiet and introverted. I was probably considered a bit laid-back – or sullen,’ Jennifer told More magazine.
‘She wore a Yale sweatshirt, baseball boots and a baseball cap at a slanty angle – all quite nauseating. We looked completely different. She thought I was snotty. I wasn’t – I was really shy and quiet.
‘Dawn seemed very grown-up and settled. And I felt a bit junior to her. She was very organised and I felt useless beside her.
‘I think when you’re at a certain age you’re in a sort of vacuum, not quite a real person yet. I was very rigid and introverted. I had a very stiff lip – from flute playing, not inbreeding – and Dawn was terribly bouncy. But also in a sort of vacuum, like me.’
For the first couple of years of the teaching course, the pair remained distinctly unimpressed by each other. No real bonds of friendship or camaraderie developed. It wasn’t until 1979 and the start of their third year on the course when things really changed.
One of the students in their year had a boyfriend who owned a nearby property that had recently been converted. It was up for rent – and eight people could share it. Dawn French was certainly up for the new conversion as she was
