DAWN FRENCH, the comedy actress, is heading off to Cornwall next month and her own personal sunset. She is convinced that she will die soon in a £2.3m house that she and her husband Lenny Henry have bought and lovingly restored.

She is completing her memoirs for which she is being paid £2m. She is writing the book in the form of letters to her close relatives, including her late father who committed suicide at the age of 45.

French, who will be 50 in October, is not suffering from any illness but says she has been certain since she was six that she would have an early death.

The actress, who played the ever-cheerful Vicar of Dibley in the TV series, reveals her fatalistic nature in an interview in The Sunday Times Magazine today.

She says she felt strongly that she wanted to be in Cornwall by the time she was 50 and believes she will die there. “I’ve never thought I’d live to be very old,” she says. “I’ve always felt that. So by 50 I want to be down there.”

She adds: “I’m not ill. I’m very fit, in fact . . . I don’t feel gloomy about it. I’m resigned to it. I don’t know why I feel so sure. I said it to my brother when I was about six.”

She and Henry, her fellow comedian whom she married in 1984, have bought a 40-room stone mansion overlooking a smugglers’ cove in the heart of Daphne du Maurier country. The grade II-listed property was built in the early 19th century by the same family who built the house on which Manderley, the setting for Rebecca, one of du Maurier’s best known novels, is based.

French, who lives in Berkshire at present, has strong links with the southwest. She was born in Saltash and was educated in Plymouth. Her mother, who used to run a poodle parlour, and her brother Gary still live in Cornwall. French was 19 when her father Denys took his own life. The former RAF man had suffered from depression after leaving the services. He gassed himself in his car.

The comedienne says that she wants to stay alive long enough to help to equip her adopted daughter, Billie, now 15, for adult life. Otherwise she is not frightened of death.

“It doesn’t feel scary, it feels like a surety,” she says. “I’m not scared of death. I want to be around for my kid to get plugged into adult life. That is the only thing I would want to live any time for.”

She adds: “I’ve told Len ever since I’ve known him, I don’t think I’ll be around for a long time. What’s weird is I’m quite a logical person and there’s not much logic to this. There are certain things I just know.”

French, who is 50 in October, says she hopes “to die slowly and nicely, in great surroundings with my family”.

She has written letters to both Henry and their daughter for her book. Another is likely to be addressed to Jennifer Saunders, her comedy partner for 27 years.

The two will be reunited for a new series, A Bucket o’ French & Saunders, which will begin on BBC1 on September 7 and is likely to be their swansong on television before they go on a farewell tour next spring.

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