Rising to the Surface: 'Moving and honest' OBSERVER

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He was introduced to Shakespeare when he made the 2006 Radio 4 series Lenny and Will. Which saw him going "in search of the magic of Shakespeare in performance." In February 2009 Henry appeared in the Northern Broadsides production of Othello. He received widespread critical acclaim in the role. Like its predecessor, the autobiography will be published by Faber & Faber and comes out next year. Henry turns over a few answers in his whirring brain, perhaps trying to decide whether to take the question seriously or to treat it as a joke. He settles on something in between. “I want a special medal,” he decides. “It wouldn’t be a gold one. Not a silver one. What comes after bronze? Pewter? I want a pewter medal. And I want it to be engraved with the words: ‘He fell over in the race. But he participated.’” I had been spotted by a movie executive who had seen my 1989 stand-up movie Live And Unleashed and called his bosses at Disney/Touchstone. He wanted to put my hat in the ring for a movie from which Eddie Murphy had just walked away. He thought I could step in and fill Eddie's shoes.

I had all the rationalisations for my weight: "Yeah, it's cool, my family are Caribbean; we're all big. We eat big food, we wear big clothes and we're proud of our appetites."The comedian's story of his upbringing in Dudley, Who Am I Again?, came out in October, finishing with his breakthrough 1975 television appearance on the talent show New Faces when he was just 16. Mum still questioned God about her various aches and pains, but eventually, she just accepted her lot in life, losing first one leg, then the other, and finally having a stroke which robbed her (and us) of her speech. When Henry wrote this up in a first volume of memoir, 2019’s Who Am I Again?, it was “like ripping off a plaster”, he says. “I felt like I was being truthful about myself for the first time, where before I’d had to be economical. And now I can talk about my birth father without feeling like …” He does an impression of a tortured superhero in pain. He grits his teeth and groans. Then he drops the performance, Lenny again, and says: “They’re all dead now. I can’t hurt them.”

Lenny was interviewed by Chris Evans on his breakfast Show on Virgin Radio: https://virginradio.co.uk/the-chris-evans-breakfast-show-with-sky/74712/sir-lenny-henry-recalls-the-moment-when-he-realised-his-life-had-changed The One Show He was the voice of the "shrunken head" on the Knight Bus in the 2004 movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and read the audio book version of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.After relating his New Faces experience in Who Am I Again?, "everybody said: 'why do you stop there, why do you stop when you're 18?'" Henry recalled on the Tea With Twiggy podcast. Even more of a legacy comes from his work with Comic Relief, covered here but in no great depth. It’s peculiar how Henry sometimes skips over big things – Dawn French, his wife of 25 years makes only cameo appearances – while he goes into great depths on the technical challenges of shooting his sitcom Chef on film rather than video. There is, perhaps understandably, little of his relationship with ex-wife Dawn French. He makes mostly passing references to bad choices, when personal life loses out to showbusiness, and there is no mention of his stint at the Priory following a tabloid scandal. But where he is forthcoming he is nothing if not honest and self-castigating; about his yo-yoing weight, and abiding feelings of inadequacy.

The friends Henry was making were a who’s who of British comic talents: Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Alexei Sayle, Tracy Ullman, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, whom he married in 1984. Up to that point, Henry confesses: “I’d been serial dating a variety of dancers from summer shows, funakteers and fellow clubbers. None of these relationships were based on [...] a “meeting of minds”. But then he met French. Their first date was at a bar in Soho called La Beat Route, and it was a peach. “I realised that you could have a reciprocal conversation with someone and not have to perform or amuse them all the time. They could make you laugh too. A massive light bulb went off over my head. BONG!”

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Towards the end of Rising to the Surface (which breaks off before his turn to academia, theatre acting and novel writing), Henry considers Winifred’s advice about life being a garden needing tending. He concludes with melancholy frankness that working within the entertainment industry can “make you the most neglectful gardener on Earth”. This was going to be a lifelong battle for me - and other members of my family - but it would come to the fore during my experiences in Hollywood. I thought to myself: "This is going to be extraordinary. This is going to be the bomb!" Well, I was half right... use of the word "bomb" is a big clue. Before flying out in the spring of '89, I had been rigorous with personal training and nutrition - and managed to get down to 15 and a half stone. I felt good about my size and shape and was ready for anything. But then, in a chapter paying off that notion of Henry “rising to the surface”, he describes winning a major industry award for one of his 2000s TV shows. The chapter comes with a photo of him holding a Golden Rose of Montreux entertainment award and the words: “What surfacing looks like.” For the reader it’s an unsettling swerve, I say. It seems to undercut his epiphanies in the previous chapters about the relative value of private and public validation. There's also that guilty feeling when you arrive for fittings and your measurements have changed. Costume designers and producers don't mean to, but they can be a bit judgemental - "Ooh, put a bit of weight on, have we? We'll have to take that all the way out." Or, "Bloody hell - size of that a**e".

Lenny's second memoir 'Rising To The Surface' is out now! Please see below some of the great interviews he has done recently about the memoir. BBC Radio 4, Loose Ends Henry with his Three of a Kind co-stars, Tracey Ullman and David Copperfield, in 1983. Photograph: Radio Times/Getty Images To date, Henry has won the prestigious TV award the Golden Rose of Montreux, helped raise more than a billion pounds for good causes, diversified his industry and grown into a beloved elder statesman of television. Yet what shall it profit a man? The book’s lasting impression is a sad one: the dutiful son unable to forgive himself for being too busy to take his mother on a final trip to Jamaica. Lenny Henry is to publish a memoir about his entertainment career and present a revisionist history of classical music for the BBC, British Comedy Guide can reveal. It's his relationship with his Mother that frames everything else that he speaks about. A massive influence in his life he still seems to feel guilt for not being around as much as he would have liked when she was very ill instead spending time on the road often overseas with his comedy gigs.

Finding my mum and then losing her

Throwing himself into his work hasn’t always brought the satisfaction he sought, either. He acutely feels a failure as a son for not always being there for his difficult, larger-than-life mother as her health failed.