Dawn French has undergone knee replacement surgery - 14 years after injuring the joint by re-creating her famous 'Vicar of Dibley' puddle stunt.
Dawn French undergoes knee surgery 14 years after recreating Vicar of Dibley puddle stunt - Instagram-DawnFrench
The 66-year-old comedian played Reverend Geraldine Granger in the classic BBC sitcom, and she famously ended up submerged in muddy water when her character jumped into a deep puddle in the 1999 special 'Autumn', before repeating the stunt once again in the 2006 finale 'The Handsome Stranger'.
But in 2009, the 'French and Saunders' star recreated the jump once again for a guest-host appearance on 'The Paul O'Grady Show', and her third attempt at the plunging skit left her knee "twisted like a pretzel".
Dawn has now gone under the knife to fix her knee.
She posted a picture of her new knee on Instagram, and wrote in the caption: "It's done. New knee is in. Now we start the healing..."
Dawn recently opened up about how recreating the puddle stunt had left her in pain for years.
In her new book, she wrote: "A surgeon gave me an injection to the knee with a steroid and lubricant. Eventually I’d need a knee replacement, but I could have three of these injections. I limped through life in a big vat of denial for ages, dragging my crumbly left knee about, knowing I only had two, and then one more pop.
"That is why you should always write down what the doctor tells you.
“I have been suffering for many years for no reason. The surgery is booked for just before Christmas!"
Dawn previously explained that while performing the stunt on the teatime chat show, she crashed onto a concrete floor in what she described as a "disaster" waiting to happen.
She told MailOnline: "The idea was that there was a long enough drop for me to disappear into. Then some bright spark had the idea of having a shallow silicon membrane containing two inches of water on top of that. As I jumped through, the water would splash up and look like a deep puddle. But what was I falling onto? The answer is absolutely nothing. Except for 10ft below, there were two very thin crash mats in a film studio with a flat concrete floor. Any fool would know this was a disaster in the making. Any fool but me."
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