'We have our wars' Dawn French and Lenny Henry's fraught relationship with daughter Billie

express.co.uk:

Dawn French, 64, revealed their “bizarre” relationship meant they could no longer live under the same roof.The Vicar of Dibley actress admitted her daughter, now 30, had moved out of the family home at the age of 24.Dawn French and her ex-husband Sir Lenny Henry adopted Billie Henry when she was just two weeks old.She said their relationship causes “frequent wars”.While they love each other, they do not always get along, she told the Daily Mail in 2015.She joked that there “would be murder” if they had continued to live under the same roof.However, her daughter’s new house, at the time, was only 12 minutes away, so they still both lived in Cornwall.Shooting to fame as part of the French and Saunders duo in the eighties and nineties, Dawn also admitted that motherhood had been a challenge for her.“I expected that if you nurture [a child], like a tomato plant, it grows towards the light, and surely if your mum is someone who wants to have fun with you and have adventures and read with you and spend time with you, how could you ever have a war?,” she said.“But I haven’t got a kid who wants to read with me and have adventures with me, I’ve got a different kind of kid who’s a different set of challenges and that’s been my lesson.“Nothing is ever what you think it’s going to be at all.”Dawn said the love between them is what keeps her going through the challenges of motherhood.“If the love wasn’t there I don’t know how we’d survive all this other stuff."Despite the ups and downs, Dawn has described her daughter as ‘the greatest achievement’ in her life.She explained: “Our relationship exists in a bizarre kind of process of peacetime, small battles, war.“The peacetime is much more than the other two energies, but we have our.