When Dawn French takes to the stage for the first time on her one woman tour she will be stepping into the unknown.

One of this country’s most famous comedians, she has toured with her friend and comedy partner Jennifer Saunders and starred in a one-woman play, but this is different.

And she’s apprehensive.

The show is called 30 Million Minutes – because that’s roughly how long she’s been alive – but Dawn still isn’t quite sure what it is.

Instead, she makes a worried noise: “It’s not a stand-up show. It’s not a play. I guess it’s a monologue because it’s just me talking. It’s a slide show to an extent. But not just a slide show. It’s not like your awful, most feared auntie who’s just come back from Egypt where you have to sit and watch everything.

“It’s quite autobiographical, so I show you the people that have made me – so to speak. There’s quite a lot about my mum and dad.”

Dawn was born in Holyhead, Wales, in 1957 when her father was stationed there with the RAF. But she spent much of her childhood in Cornwall and went to boarding school in Devon.

At home, she was a performer and her dad was too.

“He would tease me to discipline me. Very loving teasing. Lots of things were dealt with at that quite sophisticated level of lots of fun.”

French’s father gave her confidence and she remembers a “key moment” when she was leaving for a party.

“I’ve always been a big girl and shouldn’t really have been wearing hot pants,” she says. Her father, though, was supportive.

“He told me I was completely beautiful and how amazing I looked in them and that I would get loads of attention.

“So my dad gave me a sort of telling off that was about totally infusing me with confidence and I went on cloud nine to this party and I’ve actually never left that party. It was armour.”

When she was just 18, Dawn’s father Denys killed himself. Growing up, she and her brother had been shielded from his depression. It was, she says, “just like a bomb went off in our family. My mum of course would have known there was danger.

“He’d lived his whole life with it but this was in a time when you didn’t say you had mental illness if you were the head of a family.

“I still have sadness about it. Massive sadness. And I think it’s been a centre point of my life what happened with my dad.”

Soon after her father’s suicide, Dawn started at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London to do a teaching course.

There she met Jennifer Saunders, with whom she would form a hugely successful comedy double act. The pair began to make names for themselves on the alternative comedy scene in the 1980s and their long-running TV show, French and Saunders, launched in 1987. Roles on television – including the lead part in the Vicar of Dibley – and in the theatre have followed.

Now, with an autobiography and two novels also to her name, she is about to test herself again.

She will, she assures me, be more revealing in her show than she has been before. But she’s not entirely easy with it being all about her.

“It’s a little bit, ‘Aren’t I interesting?’ I keep saying to (director) Michael Grandage, ‘I need to take this out,’ and he says, ‘Absolutely not – that’s the whole point. Do not push it away from you. Absolutely own it and be completely strong and confident about that.’ “And so that’s what I’ve done.”

She certainly doesn’t seem to be on an ego-driven mission. She’s doing the tour, she says, because she’s got things to say, thinks it could be fun and because she hasn't done it before.

“I don’t need loads of positive strokes for just being alive. What I want is people to turn up and see whether what I’ve written works.”

That’s not to say, though, that there isn’t an element of attention-seeking in performance.

“I think it’s the child in us that is saying, ‘Mum, Dad look at me.’  It’s a need for approval which I think all humans have. But I think performers have it in a needy, slightly sick way.”

  • Dawn French’s 30 Million Minutes will be at Bournemouth’s Pavilion Theatre on November 19 and 20, and at Lighthouse Poole’s concert hall on November 21 and 22