Jennifer Saunders

A frustrated teacher's chance encounter

Jennifer Saunders had no intention of going on stage. In 1977, she enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London only because she was turned down for her first choice, a teacher-training course. There she met Dawn French, and that chance encounter changed the course of British television.

In the early 1980s, London's alternative comedy scene was a grimy, noisy environment. Saunders was part of The Comic Strip at a Soho venue where she earned five pounds a night. In 1982, the launch of Channel 4 gave her her first real chance in front of the camera with a series of satirical short films.

But she was not after conventional stardom. She preferred to write her own scripts to avoid the decorative female roles that were common at the time. Saunders understood early on that total control over the material was the only way to survive in an industry dominated by men.

And the gamble paid off.

Controlled Chaos: Fashion and Alcohol

In 1991, Saunders found herself alone in front of the blank page. Her partner Dawn French was busy with other shoots, so she decided to develop a ten-minute sketch about an immature mother and her responsible daughter. That's how Absolutely Fabulous was born.

The series premiered in 1992 and broke the mold of traditional sitcoms. There were no moral lessons or happy endings. Saunders played Edina Monsoon, a woman obsessed with public relations and excessive champagne consumption. The script was a fierce satire of 1990s consumerism.

Eight million viewers tuned in to BBC to watch two middle-aged women behaving appallingly on screen. Saunders wrote the episodes at her home in Devon while raising her three daughters. Filming each season was a chaotic process that depended on her ability to improvise sharp dialogue on the spot.

No one expected a fashion satire to last thirty years.

In 2016, she took the story to the big screen with Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie. Filming lasted seven weeks and featured sixty celebrity cameos from the fashion world. But at the heart of the story was the emotional codependency between two characters who refused to age with dignity.

Maturity Behind the Scenes and the Mic

Saunders always preferred voice work when the pressure of physical appearance became tedious. In 2004, she lent her voice to the Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2. Her performance of the song Holding Out for a Hero was recorded in a single studio session in Los Angeles and became one of the most lucrative moments of her career.

In 2022, she took part in the production of Death on the Nile under the direction of Kenneth Branagh. She played Marie Van Schuyler in a shoot that had to recreate the Abu Simbel temple at Longcross Studios in England due to travel restrictions. It was a dry, straightforward role that moved away from her usual comedic excess.

But her interest in social issues never completely faded. In 2022, she shot the film Allelujah, based on an Alan Bennett play about the British healthcare system. Filming took place in a former hospital in Wakefield to give the story of a geriatric ward facing closure a raw sense of realism.

Her technical work didn't stop there.

In 2024, she took on the role of narrator for the show The Underdog: Josh Must Win, bringing a satirical tone to modern reality TV. Saunders continues to operate through her own production company to avoid the demands of the major networks. In 2025, the actress kept her residence in Devon County, far from the media noise of London.

Production on her recent projects was handled through Saunders and French Ltd, a company that reported net assets of over 2.5 million pounds in its last fiscal year.