. . . but Shrek 2 won’t be. Not with Jennifer Saunders there to act the big fairy. Here she tells Fiona Morrow how it went

Jennifer Saunders and I take a moment to appreciate our surroundings. It is a blissful day on the French Riviera — azure skies, crystal clear water — and we happen to be sitting in one of its most exclusive spots. A cabana at the Hotel du Cap is about as far removed from a British beach hut as you can imagine, with clutches of freshly laundered waiters making busy squeezing oranges and brewing espresso. In Cannes for the premiere of Shrek 2, the 45-year-old Saunders is finally discovering what life is like for a Hollywood A-list star. On her arrival at Nice airport, she was greeted by three people employed to make her life easier: a studio rep, a security guard and a porter.

“Of course, I had no entourage, no screaming fans and no luggage,” she shrugs with typically British self-deprecation.

But then she has never played the fame game. To begin with, it would have been beside the point: she made her mark as part of the 1980s alternative comedy movement. In 1981 (with her friend Dawn French) she began playing the Comic Strip club in London alongside Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, and Ade Edmondson (who became her husband). She doesn’t recall ever having struggled. “But,” as she points out, “ when you’re young you don’t care if you sleep on a mattress on the floor.” Politicised and enthusiastically rude, they epitomised the anti-establishment voice of the time. Channel 4 — then an alternative voice itself — broadcast The Comic Strip Presents . . . Five Go Mad in Dorset on its opening night. Five years later, French and Saunders were off on their own, successfully changing the way people perceived female comics.

French and Saunders, once considered radical, are now firmly embraced in the bosom of BBC One’s primetime audience. Nevertheless, Saunders has kept kudos with the hip crowd through the hugely popular louche sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. Nor has she abandoned her roots: in 2001, Saunders (and French) declined the offer of an OBE.

Carousing on the Croisette is a far cry from her usual routine. She abandoned London years ago for Devon, where she lives with Edmondson and their three daughters. She gives few interviews and guards her privacy carefully. But when you sign up for a Hollywood studio movie, you are expected to do your bit. A day of international television press for Shrek 2 has left her somewhat bemused.

“By the end of it Rupert (Everett) and I were hysterical,” she admits. “He’d started to say my answers and I was saying his. Then you have to explain to everyone that you’re not laughing at them. And they’re just staring at you, obviously thinking: ‘Please stop laughing and being silly.’ They have only about 30 seconds with you, so because it ’s a second language for some of them it takes them longer to express themselves. You see the counter clicking down and they have a slightly panicked look on their face as they say (Saunders adds a thick continental accent): ‘Was it funnee for you, when you are an actor to not be in zee place when . . ?’ And I’m going (she sticks her hand up and waves): ‘Ooh, ooh, I know what you mean. Please, let me answer that question.’”

The end of the day was no less surreal — a dinner with her movie co-stars, none of whom (Everett aside) Saunders had met before. Antonio Banderas played the gallant host, making sure she was introduced to the likes of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz. But if the personalities attached to the Shrek franchise are big, the box office is even bigger. The original film did well in the cinema, and broke all records in DVD and video sales. At nine million copies sold so far, it’s the bestselling DVD yet. It also won the first Oscar for Best Animated film.

Shrek 2 has done even better — $353 million in just three weeks in the US. No wonder Shrek 3 and 4 are already being talked about. Even so, Saunders downplays her place at the Hollywood power table. In fact, she seems most excited about having met Julie Andrews.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she exclaims. “There I was and Julie Andrews was talking to me!”

Everything she says appears to come with a heavy layer of irony. Perhaps it’s the voice: posh, and filtered through lips that employ minimal movement. Maybe it’s the clipped speediness of her sentences, or even their dynamic range (she can step from a whisper to a boom almost mid-syllable). Such vocal dexterity must surely be what attracted Dreamworks to offer Saunders the role of Fairy Godmother.

She worked alone and, to begin with, pretty much in the dark. “There’s not much to go on,” she explains. “Just a drawing; but by the third session there was a much better picture.”

Is it hard, creating a character through its voice?

“Not really,” Saunders says. “It’s just like a rehearsal, I suppose. Because the film-makers have such a clear idea of what they want, it’s quite easy.” She pauses, frowns and adds quickly: “Well, it’s more intense. You do so much in a day you end up getting quite hysterical. But I enjoyed it. You really feel as though you’ve put in a day’s work. You really feel as though you’ve earned your money.”

The plot is simple: Shrek (Myers) and Princess Fiona (Diaz) take a trip to see Fiona’s parents — the King and Queen of a Land Far Far Away. The parents, of course, have no idea that their daughter was kissed by an ogre instead of a handsome Prince and has become an ogress. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Appalled horror ensues and Saunders’s Fairy Godmother steps forward to reveal an evil plan to get rid of Shrek and marry off Fiona to her son, the insufferable Prince Charming (Everett).

If that doesn’t sound much like the fairytales you remember, then that’s because this is storytime filtered through a postmodern perspective. It’s not just the innumerable references to other movies (imagine Shrek and Fiona weaving through the trees Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style), but the fact that Princess Fiona hails from a land where the elite is made up of the star attractions: Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty — it’s physical beauty that counts here. Such satire may go over the kids’ heads, but it can’t fail to please grown-ups with a sense of irony: a hugely successful mainstream movie prepared to bite (however gently) the hand that feeds it is going to be fun.

Spoofing film culture is something that Saunders knows all about. The Comic Strip uncovered a rich seam with The Strike, which imagined the miners’ strike with Arthur Scargill played by Al Pacino, and French and Saunders has always been big on film parodies. Nevertheless, Saunders stops short of calling herself a movie buff. “That happened by accident,” she insists. “We’re trying to move away from them, but the BBC love them, so. . .”

My favourite, I tell her, was their take on the Jane Campion film The Piano. Filmed on the beach at Littlehampton, it featured French in full Victorian garb, bloomers included, prancing dementedly on the sand as Flora, the Scottish child with a mute mother. Saunders’s eyes begin to twinkle.

“I remember The Piano,” she says, before letting out a loud hoot of laughter. “I remember us laughing so hard that Dawn actually peed her pants.”

Firm friends since they met at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the 1970s, the pair are currently working on a new series. “It’s bizarre, isn’t it?” she sighs. “We’re a bloody institution. Secretly, we’d like to do a BBC Three show instead of BBC One,” she says, brightening up. “When BBC Two stopped doing comedy for a bit we got into the BBC One primetime slot, which is fairly restricting. We want to be more BBC Three, but we realise we’re far too old.” She puts on her schoolmistress voice: “We’re the female Russ Abbotts and we should buckle down and stop pretending to be new and young. I think the basic premise of this series is French and Saunders: I Can’ t Believe It’s Television!” She lets out another hoot. “Because these days you do turn on and say: ‘I can’t believe this is television! Who makes this?’”

She rails against the state of the art on both sides of the Atlantic — reality TV, the lack of sitcoms, the number of adverts. She has had personal experience of American television, with Ab Fab mutating into the anodyne Cybil and a quickly cancelled series called High Society. A much-talked about movie version has been put on ice.

“So many people knew Ab Fab from cable over there, it was odd to remake it,” she notes without any bitterness. “But the audience in the US is massive, so if you’re on cable the percentage is tiny. What they’re after is the same as everybody else — cheap TV for the masses.”

Intrigued by how television operates at the moment, French and Saunders decided to do a sketch on focus groups for the new series.

“Have you ever seen the questions they use?” she demands. “You wouldn’t believe it. This is an actual question they ask after people have watched a show: ‘If the programme was a button, what kind of button would it be?’” She throws her hands up in the air in exasperation.

Saunders may be annoyed, but she will keep typing herself into the fray. There’s an Ab Fab Christmas special on the way, though not necessarily a whole series.

“The pressure is huge and absolutely horrible.” She shudders. “It’s good fun making it, but then you just have to forget about it and not read about it when it airs.”

Eventually, she says, the plan is to move into producing. “There is an age when you think: ‘I can’t do any make-up calls. I really don’t want to put on a fake nose.’”

Which must have made voicing Shrek 2 the perfect job.

“Hmm, as she (the Fairy Godmother) exploded I could see number 3 slipping through my fingers, so I tried to add an extra line at the end.”

And that was?

Saunders pulls a guilty grimace. “Oh, nothing very clever,” she laughs, before giving me the full force of those powerful lungs. “I’ll be back!”