On 5 November in Beverly Hills, Hannah Waddingham will receive the Crystal Award for Advocacy in TV at the annual Women in Film Honors. The American organisation, which campaigns for women working in film and television, is honouring an actress most viewers met late, through Ted Lasso, but who already had more than twenty years of stage work behind her.
An award for advocacy
Variety broke the news on 19 October. Kirsten Schaffer, chief executive of Women in Film, said Waddingham’s career “reflects the spirit” of the award. She pointed to Rebecca Welton, the football club owner fighting to be taken seriously in a man’s world, as a part that echoes the barriers women still face in entertainment. Off screen, Schaffer added, Waddingham uses her platform to speak up for gender equality.
The gala takes place at the Beverly Hilton and is the organisation’s largest fundraiser of the year, paying for its research, advocacy and career programmes. Salma Hayek Pinault will receive the Jane Fonda Humanitarian Award from Jane Fonda herself, while Gemma Chan and director Beth de Araújo will be recognised for the film Josephine.
A childhood around the opera house
Hannah Waddingham was born on 28 July 1974 in Wandsworth, south London, and grew up around music. Her mother, an opera singer, joined English National Opera when Hannah was eight. She trained at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts and made her West End debut in 1998 in a musical with an unlikely title, Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens.
The years that followed were steady, unglamorous work. In 2000 she played Christine in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Beautiful Game. In 2006 she became the Lady of the Lake in Spamalot, the Monty Python musical, which earned her a first Olivier nomination and took her to Broadway in 2008. Then came Desirée in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, the Witch in Into the Woods at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz at the London Palladium and Kiss Me, Kate at Chichester and the Old Vic. Three Olivier nominations in all.
That long stretch in musical theatre explains a lot about the performer she became. The job demands a voice, comic timing and enough presence to reach the back row of a big house, eight shows a week. Television would eventually notice that stamina.
From “Shame!” to Rebecca Welton
Her early screen work was modest: a part in Coupling in 2002, then Benidorm. In 2015 and 2016 she played Septa Unella in Game of Thrones, the nun who follows Cersei Lannister on her walk of atonement, ringing a bell and chanting “Shame!”. She barely had any lines, yet nobody forgot her. She went on to play Sofía Marchetti in Sex Education.
The breakthrough came in August 2020 with Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. Rebecca Welton could easily have been a sitcom villain: a woman who takes over a football club in her divorce and hires an inexperienced American coach in the hope of wrecking the club her ex-husband loved. Waddingham made her wounded, funny, sometimes harsh and in the end very easy to love. The role won her the 2021 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. She was 46. She has since returned to Rebecca for a fourth season.
Hard to pigeonhole
In May 2023 she co-hosted Eurovision in Liverpool, staged by the UK on Ukraine’s behalf. She switched effortlessly between English and French, joked with the contestants and became one of the most talked-about presenters the contest has had. That year she also hosted the Olivier Awards, which she presented again in 2024, and recorded a Christmas special for Apple TV+, Home for Christmas.
She also knows when to step back. In 2023, hours before she was due to host a BBC Proms concert, she withdrew in solidarity with the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike in the United States. It was a quiet decision, and an early sign of the advocacy Women in Film is now recognising.
On film she has built a run of memorable supporting parts: David Leitch’s The Fall Guy, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and The Woman in Cabin 10. In 2026 she shares top billing with Octavia Spencer in Ride or Die on Prime Video, an action comedy series in which she plays a woman hiding a second life as an international assassin. In July, Deadline reported that she had joined Jason Statham Stole My Bike, David Leitch’s next action comedy, shooting in the UK and Malta.
Recognition that took its time
The Women in Film award is not celebrating a newcomer. It recognises a career the industry took a long time to see properly, built in rehearsal rooms, on tour and in supporting parts played at full commitment. Waddingham found worldwide fame at an age when many actresses find the offers drying up. That she now uses the attention to talk about equality is no accident.
© Photo: Harald Krichel - CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
