Hannah Waddingham Biography
Hannah Waddingham is a singer and actress from the United Kingdom. She was born in the United Kingdom on July 28, 1974. She is best known for her role as Rebecca Welton in the Apple TV+ comedy series Ted Lasso (2020–present), for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2021 and the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2021 and 2022. She won a Primetime Emmy Award and a Critics’ Choice Television Award for this role. She has also been in a number of shows in London’s West End, such as Spamalot, Into the Woods in Regent’s Park in 2010, and The Wizard of Oz, in which she played the Wicked Witch of the West. She has been up for the Olivier Award three times because of her work.
Aside from that, she was part of the ensemble cast for the 2012 movie version of Les Misérables, and in 2015, she was cast as Septa Unella in the fifth season of the HBO show Game of Thrones. She started working on the show Sex Education in 2019 as a supporting character. In 2018, she was in the British psychological thriller Winter Ridge, which came out in the UK.
Early life and education
Waddingham was born in Wandsworth, London. Her mother, Melodie Kelly, and her maternal grandmother and grandfather were opera singers. Waddingham’s mother started singing with the English National Opera when she was eight years old. As a result, Waddingham spent most of her childhood in and around theaters.
Waddingham finished her studies at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, earning a diploma.
She can sing in four different octaves. Her first show was a comedy called Joni and Gina’s Wedding, which was part of a dinner theater production.
Personal life
At one point, Waddingham was seeing an Italian businessman named Gianluca Cugnetto. Their daughter, who was born in 2014, has an autoimmune disease called Henoch–Schonlein purpura. She keeps her Emmy award in her daughter’s room to remind her that “mummy will only ever be gone when there’s a really, blooming good reason.”
Career
Waddingham’s acting career has taken her to both London’s West End and New York City’s Broadway. She played Starbird in the 2002 play Space Family Robinson by Julian and Stephen Butler, and she played Suzanne Valadon in Lautrec.
Waddingham played the Lady of the Lake in the London production of Spamalot, which later moved to Broadway. She was up for an Olivier Award because of how well she played the part. In Trevor Nunn’s revival of A Little Night Music, where she played Desirée Armfeldt, she got a lot of praise for how well she did. One critic called her the “Joanna Lumley of musical theater” because of her work in this show. Waddingham was then nominated for an Olivier Award again in 2010 for her role in the musical Night Music. She was up for the Best Actress in a Musical award this time.
Waddingham played the Witch in a production of “Into the Woods” at London’s Open Air Theatre in the middle of the year 2010.
She was the first person to sing “Red Shoes Blues,” a new song by Lloyd Webber and Rice, in the West End production of The Wizard of Oz, which opened at the London Palladium on March 1, 2011. She is known for being the first person to play The Wicked Witch of the West on the show. On September 4, 2011, she took herself out of the show. Theatergoers chose Waddingham as the best supporting actress in a musical, and whatsonstage.com gave her the Theatergoers Choice Award.
At the concert premiere of Styles and Drew’s Soho Cinders, which took place at London’s Queens Theatre in 2011, Waddingham sang. For the show’s first fully staged production in 2012, however, Jenna Russell took her place.
In 2012, Waddingham was one of the stars of the revival of Kiss Me, Kate at the Chichester Festival Theatre. In November 2012, the show moved to the Old Vic Theatre in London, which is on the South Bank.
Waddingham was in the third episode of the fourth season of the critically acclaimed BBC sitcom Not Going Out. This happened in 2011. She played a character named Jane in an adult movie that was being filmed on the show.
She was in the 2012 movie Les Misérables, and in 2014 she was the main character in the ITV sitcom Benidorm.
Waddingham played Septa Unella, also known as the “Shame Nun,” in seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones. She started filming the scene nine weeks after giving birth to her daughter, and she did all of her own stunts, including the one where she is waterboarded. As a parting gift, she was given the famous “shame bell” from the role. In one episode of the Netflix show Sex Education, she plays Jackson’s overbearing mother, Sophia Marchetti. This part keeps coming up.
Waddingham has been playing Rebecca Welton, the owner of AFC Richmond, on the Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso since the year 2020. People have said that the way Rebecca and Juno Temple’s character, Keeley, are friends and help each other out is “refreshing.” Juno Temple is the one who plays Keeley. She sings all the parts herself in the first-season episode “Make Rebecca Great Again” and the second-season episodes “Carol of the Bells” and “No Weddings and a Funeral.” Because of how she played the character, she won both the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series and the Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2021.
Waddingham also plays Mother Witch in the sequel to Hocus Pocus, which will be called Hocus Pocus 2 and be released by Disney on September 30, 2022. It will only be available on Disney+.
People have said that the actress gives a “Oscar-worthy performance” and that “from the moment she enters, she commands the screen with undeniable authority.”
She will play Lady Bellaston in the upcoming ITV drama miniseries Tom Jones, which is based on Henry Fielding’s 1749 book of the same name.
Recordings
Under the name Hannah, Waddingham put out the song “Our Kind of Love” in October 2000. It got as high as number 41 on the UK Singles Chart.
Later, she sang the part of Starbird on the soundtrack recording of Space Family Robinson, which was released by Pop! Records in May 2002. The music was written by Julian Butler and Stephen Butler. This book came out at the same time that Space Family Robinson was put on stage in London. Waddingham played Starbird in that production, which ran for three weeks at the Pleasance Theatre.
She sang the part of Christine in the cast recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton’s musical The Beautiful Game. In London, the musical was put on in the West End.
