Rising to the Surface: 'Moving and honest' OBSERVER

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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.’” Photograph: David Vintiner/The Guardian. Set styling: Lee Flude. Fashion styling: Sarah Ann Murray. Grooming: Min Sandhu, both at Carol Hayes Management. Hair: Morris Roots. Coat: OAMC 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. From 1991 onwards, my Winifred began to fall to illness; whether it was shortness of breath, deteriorating eyesight her heart condition, she seemed to be fighting for her health every day. 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.

And she told me it was about trying to protect me. She was trying to give me a shield to deal with the outside world. Suddenly, Mum and I were able to discuss grown-up matters on a level playing field. There was mutual respect, empathy and kindness as we chatted about how difficult her life had been, raising us in England in such a hostile environment. 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.

Finding my mum and then losing her

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." In my mind, I felt myself careening downhill towards a large wall in a car with no brakes. My Hollywood travails were teaching me every day that you're nothing if you don't have control. Now Henry has penned a follow-up, Rising To The Surface, covering his career on children's show Tiswas, sketch showcase The Lenny Henry Show, the sitcom Chef! and his transition from comic roles into Shakespearean acting. which my sister & I had mistaken as rude) when we met him decades ago, when Torvill & Dean appeared at Wembley Stadium. Lenny was with Dawn French then and during the break, their daughter Billie had the privilege of skating with Torvill & Dean. My sister & I worked as stewards (begrudgingly for extra money) and at my insistence, we approached a downright miserable Lenny and a very friendly and lovely Dawn, obviously over compensating for Lenny's silence. It must have been clear to all at the time that we wanted to speak to Lenny but as he was mute, the very lovely Dawn stepped in. She was ordained as a lay preacher, and the photographs of her on that momentous day are joyous. She's got a big smile on her face and is wearing her church crown - we were all very proud.

So the adoption process began, and then we had to wait. One year later, our daughter Billie arrived. Happiness burst out and times were good. 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 Once True Identity was completed, there were premieres to attend and some promotional duties, but my heart wasn't really in it. I was excited for everyone to see what we'd managed to achieve, but I knew that it wasn't the real marinara sauce. Dawn and I flew home from LA, and the VHS of True Identity was in the bargain video pile at the corner shop up the road before we'd even touched down. Yet Rising To The Surface is an easy read, and although the tone is lightly self-deprecating, the takeaway is that Henry has too much baggage to ever quite enjoy all he’s achieved, even if he often has fun doing it at the time.

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. I was fortunate to be asked to take part in the Nelson Mandela tribute concert at Wembley Stadium: Mandela at 70! We'd experienced a number of unsuccessful rounds of IVF but were determined to expand our family. We'd been talking about adoption for some time and decided to go for it. We weren't going to let the misery of our time in LA dominate our future; we wanted our lives to be full of kids and fun and laughter. With his mother Winifred after winning talent show New Faces in 1975. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images My weight was yo-yoing not just because I was a greedy pig. I had been hard-wired by the gods to have this sugar intolerance.

In between trips to the hospital for various treatments, Mum was becoming a very capable advocate for her church. She'd go out collecting donations at local pubs and clubs with fellow parishioners. More significant for his career were his co-writers – Jon Canter, Kim Fuller and Geoff Posner – all of whom he praises fulsomely. But is there something telling that as a stand-up, he’s never entirely written his own material? Lenny Henry’s mum used to say to him: our lives are like gardens. Be careful what you plant in them because everything needs tending. “And I don’t think I’ve planted my own garden very judiciously,” Henry says when we meet for lunch on a mild September afternoon. It is three weeks to the day since he published a volume of his memoirs, Rising to the Surface. In another three, his children’s novel, The Book of Legends, will appear in bookshops. Overnight, episodes of the new The Lord of the Rings TV show, The Rings of Power, will appear online; Henry has a small role as a hobbit. At home in Oxfordshire he keeps a copy of The Sopranos scripts on his bedside table, to help him sharpen his showrunning work on an imminent ITV drama about the Windrush generation. GQ magazine recently suggested that Henry was undergoing a renaissance (a “ Lenaissance”, they said) but honestly, all through his long career, Henry has flitted and filled his days like this, gigging, writing, acting, campaigning, broadcasting, studying. But as I got older, I'd ponder on what Mum had sacrificed to raise all of us; how difficult it had been for her being separated from the rest of the family in Jamaica. 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!”

I'd drive the hundred or so miles to be at my mum's house the minute the mutton soup with dumplings and yam was cooked, simmered and ready to serve. 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. However, upon listening to his sequel to Who Am I? I think I now understand why he was so miserable - perhaps he was grieving? It couldn't be because we approached him to say hello, as we were respectful that his daughter was ice skating and the whole encounter lasted, what 20 seconds? Either way, Lenny obviously didn't care because he never so much as looked at us sideways, just blanked us. Dawn didn't. She was lovely. That said, now I've listened to what he was going through at the time. I understand. Directed by classical music documentarian Guy Evans, The Hidden History Of Classical Music is made by Henry's Douglas Road Productions, whose The Story Of Gospel Music In Six Songs with Mica Paris aired on BBC Four on Monday, and whose forthcoming slate includes a BBC One adaptation of Kit de Waal's bestselling novel My Name Is Leon.