During the early hours of a Monday morning in May 1999, a Jaguar sports car raced the 250 miles from Cornwall to a gracious redbrick manor house in the upmarket Berkshire village of Shinfield.
At the wheel was a tearful Lenny Henry. The comedian, who was on tour in Truro, had at the last minute thrown a few hastily collected clothes into a bag and sped home through the night to be with his wife, Dawn French.
In the drawing room of their Queen Anne home the lights were burning and a pale and shaking Dawn was waiting for her husband. It would not be a happy reunion. For the next few hours after his arrival, the house would witness scenes of raw emotional tumult, confessions, accusations and ultimatums.
Troubled times: Lenny Henry and Dawn French have remained together despite their problems
And by the time a stony-faced Dawn finally emerged the next morning - her puffy eyes hidden behind dark glasses - and roared away in her own sports car,
their marriage hung by a thread.
Inside, Lenny was at the point of a nervous breakdown. He had rushed back to tell his comedienne wife that the previous week, while appearing on stage in York, he had spent the night with a 26-year-old blonde.
Worse, he was forced to reveal to her that the details of his hotel liaison with Australian receptionist Merri Cheyne were about to be splashed over the front page of a tabloid newspaper.
For her part, Dawn was shell-shocked. Not only was she facing the prospect of her husband's indiscretions being made public property, there was an added, and devastating, humiliation.
For years, Dawn had been the self-appointed cheerleader for fat women everywhere. Her mantra had been that big ladies were not just sexy, but were positively sexier than their skinny counterparts.
Indeed, her championing of the cause of bigger women - no better exemplified than in her role as the larger-than-life Rev Geraldine Granger in the BBC1 sitcom The Vicar Of Dibley - was one of the reasons she became one of Britain's best-loved personalities.
Central to her confidence in herself as a fat woman had been Lenny, whom she had married 15 years earlier. Lenny, Dawn seldom tired of saying, would never so much as look twice at a woman who was not suitably well upholstered.
Dawn and Lenny have been 'living separate lives'
'Big women do sex fantastically well. We know how to use our mighty weight and know the considerable power of a full and voluptuous body,' she gushed. 'My husband's Jamaican and comes from a family of big women. For him it's the norm and thin women are a turn-off.'
But Lenny had not been caught spending the night in a hotel room with a size-16-plus woman, but with that old cliché, a slim, pretty blonde. For Dawn it was a double betrayal. She faced having her words publicly and painfully thrown back in her face.
As Dawn's unofficial biographer, I can attest that the fall-out of what happened in those dark days has never truly left her. But with their relationship staring over the precipice, it was Dawn who decided it was worth saving.
Not least because - as we will discover in this major new series on the talented Dawn French - Lenny is one of only two men she has ever been in love with. Sadly, both were to let her down.
'I don't think anyone will ever understand how hard Lenny's fling hit her,' a long-time friend of Dawn's told me.
'There was a moment when she could have walked away and nobody would have blamed her, but Dawn is stronger than Lenny.
'She decided that in spite of what he had done, she still wanted him. She had to think for both of them. Plus, she had their daughter, Billie, to think about.'
Dawn amazed everyone with her resilience. She had a commitment to be at the BBC studios in London the day the story broke, where she and her comedy partner, Jennifer Saunders, were filming their new sitcom, the ill-received Let Them Eat Cake.
She went into work as planned.
Her steely message to the world was that it would be business as usual. But while she vowed privately to weather the storm, Lenny fell apart. And there was more anguish to come.
Less than a fortnight later, a Sunday newspaper claimed Lenny had embarked on a 'sleazy spree' while staying on the holiday island of Tenerife six months earlier.
What was dubbed his 'night of shame' allegedly occurred on the last night of a BBC film assignment in the popular resort Playas de las Americas when, the paper claimed, he had gone on a drunken 12-hour 'bender' and harassed dancers at a strip club.
It proved the final straw for Lenny, who was maintaining publicly - as was the blonde Miss Cheyne - that nothing had happened during their night together in the York hotel.
He cancelled his shows and checked into the Priory clinic in South-West London, claiming to be suffering from depression.
Lenny later put his behaviour down to what he called a 'classic mid-life crisis', brought on by turning 40 and the death of his mother Winifred a year earlier.
Dawn's new autobiography Dear Fatty is published next month For understandable reasons, what happened next has been the subject of some airbrushing by Dawn, who later sought to write off the episode as a 'mere blip'. It was anything but. As she struggled to come to terms with what had happened, Dawn consulted a therapist and wavered for months about whether to leave Lenny.
In the wake of the two revelations about him, she issued her husband with an ultimatum. If they were going to overcome their difficulties, they had to clear their diaries and take time out to concentrate on their marriage.
With their seven-year-old adopted daughter Billie, they headed to New Zealand, where they spent three months in a camper van.
The holiday did much to mend fences, but the fissures in their marriage were far from healed. In fact, her friends say it had been her gut instinct after the second episode to tell Lenny it was all over between them.
Instead, Dawn ruled that in future when Lenny was on tour in Britain he would travel home each night instead of staying in a hotel.
That was not the only thing that changed. Perhaps as a reaction to her public humiliation and the rumours that were still swirling in showbiz circles about the state of their marriage, Dawn became tight-lipped about her home life.
And whereas formerly she seemed always to be extolling the virtues of their amazing sex life, she was no longer as effusive about her 'Len' as she once was.
But it did little to quell the gossip. Six months later, rumours that divorce papers had been filed in Reading led the couple to take the unprecedented step of faxing newspapers, denying they were getting divorced.
Despite the denials, those close to her tell me that at that stage Dawn did not know if their marriage could survive.
And, in truth, there had been strains in their relationship for some time. After 18 years together they had begun to grow apart. The situation was not made any easier by them sharing substantial egos and an obsession with work.
As far back as 1991, Dawn had been hinting that their life together was by no means easy. 'I'm conscious all the time that you've got to work very hard at marriage,' she said. 'I can't imagine how people survive otherwise.'
Three years before his liaison with Miss Cheyne, Lenny said the adoption of Billie in 1991 had saved their marriage. 'Before Billie came along our careers came first and, both being very ambitious, we worked hard,' he said at the time. 'We pushed ourselves to the brink. I'd come home at midnight and Dawn would arrive at 3am, which made things very difficult.'
And he added: 'If you both do everything at the same time as each other, that way lies disaster. You learn from mistakes and discover that anyone working really hard and putting work first is in danger of ruining a relationship.'
It had once been so different. The unlikely looking couple - he's 6ft 3in and she's barely 5ft - met in 1981 at the Comedy Store club in London, where French and Saunders were performing.
The then 23-year-old Dudley-born Lenny was already a big star, having found fame on the TV talent show New Faces when he was just 17.
By the time he met Dawn he was appearing in the late night show OTT with Chris Tarrant, having just left the ITV children's series Tiswas.
It was, however, hardly a case of love at first sight. Lenny asked Dawn if she would consider writing some material for his act, but she said no (she later admitted she'd thought he was 'loud and revolting').
But when they met again a few months later at a recording of their friend Alexei Sayle's show at the BBC studios, they hit it off.
Dawn rang her mother and said: 'You know when I was little, you were always telling me about the big black bogeyman who would come and get me if I didn't go to sleep? Well, he's come and got me!'
They were married in 1984 at St Paul's Cathedral in London - an occasion for which Dawn embarked on the first diet of her life. She was a size 20, but was determined to fit into a size 12 wedding dress.
However, with just six weeks to go and having not managed to lose any weight, she resorted to a cocktail of pills and slimming injections. She lost six stone and managed to get into her dress, but the crash diet left her feeling tired and ill. She vowed never to diet again, a resolve she put into practice immediately by stuffing her face at the reception, held at The Savoy.
'I started the day a size 12 and finished it a size 14,' she joked. The marriage, however, was destined to have more than its fair share of problems. As one of Britain's first high-profile mixed-marriage couples they came under attack from racist bigots from the outset. But a source of even more angst was her inability, after years of trying, to give birth to the child she and Lenny so longed for.
In her new autobiography, Dear Fatty, which is published on October 9, she reveals in a moving letter to Lenny just how much they struggled to have a family of their own.
She writes: 'Thank you for your patience and understanding and total commitment to the endless rounds of heartbreaking IVF failures we endured together, while quite often simultaneously celebrating yet more arrivals of new babies in the lives of our chums.
'The sneaking in and out of clinics, often at night, to avoid interest. The discovery of various problems, on both sides. The support we gave each other. The awful painful injections you had to administer to me at home and your sweet, crinkled face, so reluctant to hurt me with them, but so determined to try to make it work.
'The isolation of not being able to speak about it to others, for fear of alerting the media. The endless samples and specimens. The jokes about it. The miscarriages and the grieving. Two of us quietly forging ahead in our great longing for a baby.'
When the couple decided to adopt, they were initially turned down by social services because Dawn was deemed to be too fat. It was only by agreeing to go on another diet that she managed to meet their health requirements - a process she still bitterly resents.
In the book, she recalls 'the uphill adoption process. The hours of interviews, the reports, the questions, the counselling and the minute scrutiny of our marriage by strangers. The intrusion, the enforced dieting, the breath-holding and, eventually, the utter joy.
'We sailed together in one boat on this most private and personal sea of troubles, safeguarding each other throughout.'
With these simple words, Dawn makes it clear that the once-raw wound over Lenny's betrayal has healed. But talking to their friends recently, a familiar picture of them has re-emerged.
Once again, it seems the career-driven couple have reverted to their old ways and have been living separate lives.
At the heart of their somewhat long-distance relationship has been 50-year-old Dawn's insistence on relocating the family home to her native West Country. It was with a typically melodramatic flourish that she announced last year she was moving to Cornwall 'to die'.
But the relocation has proved to be something of a nightmare.
The renovation of her £2.4million seaside retreat overlooking a harbour has dragged on, with builders still very much ensconced in the property almost two years after its purchase.
The quiet life she envisaged for herself remains as elusive as ever and she has cut a somewhat harassed and dejected figure locally.
On a recent occasion, one of the hottest days of the year, she pulled into her local petrol station after another long drive from London, with her 16-year-old daughter and a carload of teenagers on board.
She emerged from her car looking tired and, according to one onlooker, 'very, very fraught'.
Indeed, so stressful has the whole process of travelling to their new home become that I am told that Lenny has taken to making solo flying trips in a chartered helicopter in order to check on the builders' progress, rather than face the misery of the gruelling five-hour trip down the M4 and M5.
The couple have also felt the need to send letters of apology to their neighbours over the nuisance of the building work.
I am told Dawn and Lenny realise they seriously underestimated the work involved in turning the 40-room Gothic pile from a maze of small flats back into a family home.
They have spent precious little time together in recent months. Earlier this year, Dawn spent two months touring Britain with Jennifer Saunders in their show, French & Saunders: Still Alive, billed as the comedy duo's farewell tour.
No sooner had that finished in May than Lenny took to the road with his own live show, a string of dates that culminated in his spending July in Australia and New Zealand.
After another brief helicopter visit to the Cornish village (where he has permission to land in a neighbouring field) he was back on the road, appearing in the North and East Anglia.
From next month, Dawn will promoting her autobiography. After that, she and Miss Saunders will be at London's Drury Lane theatre for the final three weeks of their tour.
None of which leaves much opportunity for the Henry family to settle into their new home together.
Their friends tell me that it was Dawn who was behind the idea of moving, while Lenny wavered over whether or not to make the move. For her part, it seems, the decision to up sticks was non-negotiable.
To a certain extent Lenny, who turned 50 at the end of August, has kept on his old life in their Berkshire home, which they retain, and their flat in London - often on his own.
Meanwhile, Dawn is wont to jokily taunt her greying husband that other women are no longer interested in him. 'She says, "They're not going to look at you now, you're an old man",' Lenny confided recently with more than a hint of regret.
Nonetheless, their complicated marriage endures.
On Monday, in the second part of our series, I shall reveal how Dawn's first love - the man she planned to marry - betrayed her in the most cruel way, and how her father's suicide when she was just 19 has profoundly shaped her life ever since.
Source: Daily Mail UK., September 26, 2008
How Dawn French saved her marriage following Lenny Henry's destructive affair with a slim blonde 
Re: How Dawn French saved her marriage following Lenny Henry's destructive affair with a slim blonde 
Linear Mode
