SHE was 46 when finally catapulted to stardom but Ted Lasso actress Hannah Waddingham says finding fame later in life was the best thing that happened to her.
Now 49, Hannah, who made her name in three series of the hit Apple TV+ comedy drama show since it started in 2020, feels years of knockbacks gave her the inner confidence to succeed — and now she is unstoppable.
She says: “It really does feel more special. You know, I’ll be 50 and can celebrate that and the fact that I’ve gone into everything with a full heart and given 100 per cent to it.
“And I’m glad that it didn’t happen when I was 20, 25, 30, because I know who I am. I don’t apologise for who I am.”
In the show Hannah plays Rebecca Welton, owner of a fictional struggling Premier League football side AFC Richmond, who hires American football coach Ted Lasso to run her struggling team.
But while Hannah’s fame as the ballsy footie boss has inspired women the world over, her eight-year-old daughter Kitty is still more impressed by pop heart-throb Harry Styles.
Hannah, a single parent to Kitty after splitting with her Italian hotelier partner Gianluca Cugnetto in 2022 after a decade together, says: “She said, ‘Mummy, we were talking at school about who inspires us and I said Harry Styles . . . and you’.
“I went, ‘What, me?!’ Joking. I mean, I was slightly gutted about getting second billing.”
But Hannah was nonetheless made up to be mentioned despite her long hours away from home while filming.
She told Michelle Visage’s BBC podcast Rule Breakers: “I said, ‘Baby girl, you have made my day, my week, my month and my year, because you know Mummy struggles being away from you.’
“And she went ‘Yes, but Mummy, you’ve got to go away and do all the things so we can do all our things’.
“And I thought, ‘It’s gone in, it’s gone in’. Isn’t that gorgeous. I’m not going to lie, I lay in the bath and had a big boo-hoo.
“I just thought, ‘Thank God, I’m blessed that she gets it and she doesn’t just think, ‘Why isn’t Mummy here?’”
But it has been a long and winding road to prime-time TV success for London-born Hannah.
She started in theatre, aged 24, with a part in 2006 West End musical Saucy Jack And The Space Vixens, about a cabaret cast who fall victim to a serial killer.
Some TV work came along, in BBC sitcom Not Going Out in 2011, then later in Netflix comedy drama series Sex Education.
She was 39 and eight months pregnant when, in 2013, she auditioned for Game Of Thrones.
She landed the role of “Shame” bell-ringing Septa Unella, who she played in seasons five and six.
Despite “horrific anxiety” for leaving her daughter for nine weeks after giving birth, she flew to Croatia for filming.
But it was the start of things to come after years of being repeatedly turned down for parts.
Hannah, who is 5ft 11in, said of castings: “Being a woman who is not small, I’d always struggled.
“The amount of times they’d be like, ‘Well, we have cast a guy who is 5ft 7in’, or, ‘We’ve already cast a guy that is this big’. And you are like, ‘OK’.”
But when Ted Lasso co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis, 48, who plays loveable Lasso, took a chance on Hannah, everything changed.
She says: “I was, like 45 when we started shooting, which in itself is fabulous and unusual — it’s ridiculous that it is so unusual.
“But the fact he was like, ‘I don’t care that she is taller than me’, that is unique — where the man is so generous they want to raise you up and celebrate everything you are, not that you are some skinny mini.
“Even if you are 6ft 2in in heels you still have every kind of doubtful thought and every vulnerability as much as the next person.
“It’s been life-changing for me and I have so much to thank Jason for.
“It’s really just blown the doors open on my career.”
Yet while her career is working out fabulously, her love life is a different matter.
Hannah admits that as her confidence in acting has grown, her tolerance of men’s shortcomings has gone out the window.
She told the podcast Reign With Josh Smith: “In my twenties and thirties, and maybe the beginning of my forties, I would allow myself to be dimmed by negative men.
“Now they can all sod off until someone fabulous comes along.
“At a whiff of somebody bringing me down, I think, ‘Next! Goodbye. What’s your name again?’”
Since ending her relationship with Kitty’s dad, Hannah has been linked to opera singer Alfie Boe, 50.
They were believed to have had a romance last year, after knowing each other for years.
But for now, it seems, Hannah is single.
She says: “My love life is dry. I’m so busy and just a bit picky.
“I’m nearly 50 and I’m like ‘Dude, if you are not going to step up, step off and be gone’.
“I’d rather hang with my girlfriends and gay friends and be respected.”
But the lack of romance in her life is not holding Hannah back and she exudes happiness.
Not only has she won awards for Ted Lasso, including an Emmy, last year she co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest as well as festive special Hannah Waddingham: Home For Christmas, with special guests for a musical extravaganza at the London Coliseum.
In April she will present theatreland’s Olivier Awards for a second year and next year will line up alongside Tom Cruise in the latest Mission: Impossible movie.
Hannah could not be prouder of being an older working woman in showbiz.
She says: “I feel like we are finally, as women, you know, we’ve got this and then some.
“We’ve been waiting in the wings, as it were. You don’t have to be any one thing, those days are gone.
“I thank the fact that those restrictions have been removed for me.”
But with success comes compromise, and Hannah tells how juggling her career with being a mum is an ongoing battle.
Talking about the mum guilt, she says: “It’s there. I don’t know whether men have it as strongly as we do.
“I don’t know if that’s because the children have come from our bodies or something. It’s called mum guilt — you don’t have dad guilt, seemingly.
“When men are there, they’re there, wholeheartedly, but when they are gone, they are gone.
“Whereas we just have an in-built desperate, overwhelming guilt.
“But by the same token, I am also acutely aware of providing for my daughter.”
Hannah added of being away from her daughter while working: “I call every morning, I call every night.
“But now that she’s getting older I was thinking, ‘Oh God, the more conscious she is of all of it’.”
Hannah keeps her Emmy award in her daughter’s room to show Kitty her mum’s absences are worthwhile.
She also tells how her newfound financial success enables her to take Kitty travelling around the world, with a nanny in tow.
Hannah says of that Emmy award: “Going back to the mummy guilt, I just said [to Kitty], ‘I want you to look at this, my girl, and see that Mummy will only ever be away for a very good reason.
“Because I don’t come from money, I don’t come from being able to have whatever you want and all the rest of it.
“It’s good that I don’t, in a way, because it means I value it deeply.
“But it meant that as a single mum I could give Kitty a life I had never had, and afforded me the luxury of having a nanny — someone travelling with me and doing all those things and letting Kitty see the world that I never saw.
“I want her to see all corners of it, and I can give her that. I have that show to thank for it.”
