She’s an award-winning actress of both stage and screen, so it’s little wonder Hannah Waddingham ’s 10-year-old daughter has inherited the performing gene. The Ted Lasso star says her daughter Kitty – from her eight-year relationship with Italian businessman Gianluca Cugnetto – already has an impressive singing range for her age. Hannah herself, though not formally trained, has a rare four-octave vocal range, while her own mother, Melodie Kelly, was the principal at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden before Hannah was born, reports OK!.
“She then took 11 years off to bring up myself and my brother,” Hannah, who is one of the voice artists in the children’s BBC Christmas animation Tiddler, explained. “And then she went back in – supposedly low-key, so that she could be mama and on stage – to the chorus of the English National Opera at the London Coliseum. Both her parents were also opera singers, so it’s in the bloodstream.
“And now my little girl, I hear up in the house, and she’s [sings in an opera style] and I just think, ‘That’s not normal!’ So it’s in the blood, for sure.” Hannah has never publicly spoken about her split from Gianluca, but their last red- carpet appearance together was at the Olivier Awards in April 2022. The following year, Hannah, 50, referred to herself as “a single mother” in an interview and has been successfully juggling her role of mum with work ever since.
But motherhood hasn’t always been plain sailing for the star, who was born in south London – in fact, she was once told she couldn’t have children. “I was naturally in shock, it’s not something you ever expect to hear,” she said. “I went down the kind of Eastern medicine route and for me, thankfully, it worked. On my 40th birthday, I came out of hospital with her after a few days of complications.
“If I didn’t have her, I would be a little husk in the corner. She’s my best little friend and she is my moral compass. Even when I’m exhausted from being a single parent, she’s my hero. “She’s named after my beloved grandmother. I do believe that she was sent to me and will always be my greatest companion.”
Hannah faced more turmoil when Kitty ended up in hospital after she was “suddenly taken very ill”. She was later diagnosed with the auto-immune disorder Henoch-Schönlein purpura (HSP ), a condition that affects young children and involves swelling of small blood vessels, and can often lead to kidney issues. It took the star many years before she could publicly open up on the trauma of what her little girl went through. “I can talk about it now,” she said last year, “but I couldn’t for a very long time. She was in the hospital for a while with them not knowing what it was.”
Following her daughter’s diagnosis, Hannah decided to only take on acting jobs that were close to home and that wouldn’t take her away from Kitty in London. She auditioned for Ted Lasso, taking part in a two-hour chemistry reading with Jason Sudeikis, and after learning they were filming in Richmond, south west London, Hannah prayed she’d land the role of Rebecca Welton – but convinced herself she hadn’t.
“I went along to the meeting with big old Jason and had a lovely time,” she recalled. “And then at the end of it I said, ‘Thank you so much for such a lovely time. Whoever gets it. I’ve had a lovely time today – bye!’ I just didn’t think [I’d get it]. They made me wait for bloody ages to find out about whether I got it, so I go back home to single mummyhood again thinking, ‘I thought I did really well!’ But I have had so many rejections that your brain already goes… ‘You know what, I’m so used to this rejection. It’s OK. It’s OK.’ Because ultimately, it all comes to you if it’s meant to and I’d kind of put it to bed in my head.
“Then I suddenly got a conference call with a huge amount of people and I thought, ‘Please tell me they’re not all jumping on this call to say no.’ And then they said, ‘The terms of the agreement is this and blah blah blah.’ I had to go and pick my daughter up at school without going, [screams] ‘Oh, my God my life has just changed!’ It was incredible.”
And life did very much change for Hannah – she won a 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 again in 2022. “There’s not even a word to describe how much it changed things,” Hannah said.
“I’m never going to be chilled about [winning awards] – ever! And you know why? Because I know so many brilliant actors on-screen or in the theatre that, trust me – and I’m not saying this to sound humble – definitely deserve it more than me, so it’s never lost on me, the privilege and the status and the recognition of having that. I really do bloody appreciate it. And I will never change from being like that. I don’t take any of it for granted. It can easily go to somebody else and there’s far too many of us at it, so if you take it all for granted, I’m sorry, you’ve turned into an a******e!” So where does an award-winning actress display her honours?
“The Emmy originally lived in my daughter’s room because I did want her to see that I don’t just naff off for no reason,” she said. “But I realised that she could probably have her eye out with the wings because she was only seven at the time, so now it sits in front of my hob in the kitchen. She’s very good for propping things like post, recipes, to-do lists – not disrespectfully. She’s an active lady!”
Performing is clearly something Hannah loves to do. Not only has she appeared on the big and small screen, but she’s performed in both West End and Broadway shows such as The Wizard Of Oz, Spamalot – for which she received an Olivier Award nomination – and Into The Woods, to name a few.
“I don’t remember not wanting to [act],” she said. “It’s just in me and it’s a vocation. I would have been a bit screwed if I’d had to do something else, I just wouldn’t have been any good at it at all. “Although one of my earliest recollections is me and my mum standing outside the bathroom door, my dad in the bathroom, and she said, ‘Tell Daddy what you want to be when you grow up?’ And I went, ‘I want to be a lady who takes her clothes off!’ And I kind of am!”
Earlier this year Hannah hit the big screen once again alongside Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy, while 2025 sees her star alongside Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. “How exciting is that?” she says. “[Tom] is very lovely. I do think he’s the last of our great movie stars. He really is.”
And can we expect her daughter to be designing something for the premiere? Earlier this year Hannah attended the Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles with a clutch bag that Kitty made out of cardboard. Hannah said, “We had this spare bit of cardboard knocking about and she rolled it and went, ‘Oh, Mummy, that looks like one of your bags that you use on the red carpet,’ so she started colouring it and then she’d written ‘EPIC’ on it – I think probably because I overuse that word a lot.
“So then I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to use her bag.’ I mean, it’s definitely more capacious than some of the little designer ones I get given. I think it accidentally made more of a stir than the dress!” And so impressed was Hannah by her daughter’s creative design that she has since trademarked the piece. She said, “Because I thought if somebody bloomin’ makes one of these, I’m making sure that no one’s going to make this exact one because if anyone is going to benefit from it, it’s going to be my daughter – she gets the pennies!”
