Chapter 1: What insights does Hilary Whitehall share about her life journey?
Hello and welcome to The Midpoint. My guest today is someone who by her own admission is having something of a later life renaissance. Her second act is going very well indeed and not in a way she could have ever predicted. Hilary Whitehouse was an actress looking for an agent when she went for a coffee with Michael Whitehouse. He wanted a wife, not just a client.
He was 21 years older than her and divorced. But it turned out to be not just a professional match made in heaven, but a personal one too. 40 years later, they are still going strong. Although the business and family continue to be entwined. One of their three children is a certain Jack Whitehall, who's made his father and his family a central tenant of his comedy over the last 15 years or so.
As a result, Hilary's acting roles in the likes of Miranda and Bad Education might not have brought her as much attention as her podcast The Wittering Whitehalls and the role of being Jack's mum. But Hilary is also keen to talk about another new role which she stepped into, being a grandma and how that and being a mother-in-law have been more life-changing than any of her later life fame.
Let's go meet Hilary. Hilary Whitehall, welcome to The Midpoint. Thank you so much. I'm very excited about this chat because you approached me and told me you needed to come on. There's a few things to get off your chest. There are a few things I need to talk about, yes, indeed, which we will come on to. But you have just referenced the fact that I'm wearing silver today.
I'm channeling my, because I'm obsessed with this particular topic, with no knowledge of it particularly, other than I'm fascinated by it. This is my Artemis Astronaut. A homage. Okay. Because I was fascinated by that whole thing. Do you dress according to world events? On this occasion, yes. But I like to try and theme what I'm wearing. Do you? And I sort of feel, this is very Artemis, I feel.
I love this. Because I know Claudia Winkerman has talked about the Strictly wardrobe. Not the Traitors one. How she would have, say, Elvis as a point of reference for a whole series. And yours is much...
bigger than that really if we're talking bigger with a slightly smaller audience I feel than darling Claudia who I adore but yes I think that she's singing to a bigger crowd see I'm just my my person is Laura Bacall I just think of would Lauren wear this yeah and in the same way we used to have a thing my daughter and I um about what would Joanna Lumley do Yes.
Which somebody else had given to me as a kind of way of referencing problem solving kind of conundrum, you know. But I like the fact that that it's an astronaut day today. It's perfect. I've got very extreme as I've got older, I think, because one of my roles now.
as a grandmother which i am now a grandmother we are a grandmother to quote mrs thatcher um is to embarrass my children so i like to be extreme i like to have be out there with my clothing do they notice now because they're probably quite used to you yep sequins is my sort of go-to now i love a sequin in fact we have a wedding incoming at the weekend you were saying yes so whose wedding is this this is the big one yes yes
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Chapter 2: How has becoming a grandmother changed Hilary's perspective?
Yeah. Well done. so we had a because we got married on michael's birthday on the basis that he would never forget the wedding anniversary never remembers because it's his birthday it's all about him exactly so we had a joint 86th birthday party slash 40th wedding anniversary party How lovely. It's the Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby wedding.
And then, obviously, Jack and Roxy's wedding anniversary is going to be a week later. It is. And the reason that we didn't do it, I want to have a massive party. I will be having a massive party, just to let you know, at the end of the summer, because I didn't want to trample all over their time. This is their time, definitely.
Yeah, and that would have probably taken a little bit of attention away. Yes, if I'd had 200 people in a room yesterday, I think they might have thought, but we're doing this next weekend. And are you having that kind of number to the wedding? Their wedding is slightly smaller than that, yes. Are they the ones who've orchestrated and choreographed everything? Literally 100%.
We've had nothing to do with it. A wedding planner has been involved to the point that when I asked Jack what the dress code was several weeks ago with regards to buying a dress, he gave me the wrong dress code. So I got the wrong dress. I said, do you not? I mean, the wedding invitation has arrived with a completely different dress code on it, Jack. He said, oh, yeah, sorry about that, mumza.
He said astronaut. That is the theme for this wedding. Yes. So the wedding's coming up this weekend. I mean, that is so. Have you married any other children off? Yes, but both of my other children got married before Jack. Okay. Yes. So this is the last of my children getting married. The last to go. And we're going to have a real hoolie. Yeah. I can feel it. I can feel it in my bones.
I'm sure it's going to be fantastic. And I've gone big on the dress, as you would expect. A big dress or expensive dress? Not an expensive dress. It's a dress I actually bought about four years ago off a sale rail. And I thought one day that dress is going to go. I've never worn it. One day that dress is going to come into its own and this is the weekend because it is ruby red and it's sequins.
Of course it is. So it's a black tie wedding. It's a black tie wedding. We had black tie. Oh, did you? I think it's quite good to give as much direction to men as possible with a dress code. I agree. And they can't go wrong with black tie. No. I mean, obviously, I married a Scot, not obviously, but I married a Scot, so there were a lot of kilts and black tie.
Nice.
Or tout and trues as well, so there's a bit of variation. And as an homage and an honour to him, a lot of his English rugby playing friends wore kilts as well, which is quite a big deal. But this is going to be a glamorous wedding then. You can really go for it. Go to town on it. I spent the morning, this morning, the reason I was...
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges and joys of being a mother-in-law?
How many children? I've got four. But you weren't cleaning the big people's clothes. You mean the grandchildren? I mean the grandchildren, yes. You've got four grandchildren. The spag bol out of the white T-shirt. You know that one? Yes, yes. Yeah, I remember those. I'm a big fan of nappy sand. That is a go-to. That's how I used to clean Jack and Bonnie's cricket whites. Right. Nappy sand.
I mean, back in the day, I would have had, I'm sure you did Terry Towning nappies. I don't know what I didn't, I'm ashamed to say. So you didn't use nappy sound back then. I can't believe it. This is the first time on The Midpoint the word nappy sound has actually been mentioned, which I think the end point, we might start talking nappy sound again, might we? Yes, I like it.
But not for The Midpoint. Now, before we started recording, I asked you a question. You said, I'll save that. What was that about? How was your day? Well, I've sort of told you what my day was because we were doing black tie jackets or sort of smoking jacket for my son. I thought something terrible had happened on the way here. No, just as I'm up in town, I thought I'll maximise my time.
So you're not up in town that often these days then? Well, it's funny. We live on the fringes. I mean, I live in Putney. Well, you're right. Yeah. To me, I'm a country girl. You're in town. Where are you? We're out South Bucks. So it's not that far. But probably sometimes it takes me as long to get home as you. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, all the bridges that are now closed.
Last week, I have to say, we had we came up to do Mark Wogan's podcast. Lovely, Mark. And we had a car back. Other podcasts are allowed.
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Chapter 4: How does Hilary balance family responsibilities with personal health?
Yes. Other podcasts on other platforms are allowed. We had a car back. They shut the end of the New Kings Road. It was literally a 10-foot section of the New Kings Road right where it meets Putney Bridge. Now, Putney Bridge is already challenging because they've just changed all the layout of it, which has caused carnage. I mean, it took us nearly three hours to get home.
Did you not feel like getting out and walking? Well, I would have done had Mr. Whitehall had the right shoes on. It's all about shoes at this age now. His bloody stilettos again. Exactly. They've only left my shoes alone. You have got a 21-year age gap, haven't you? We have got a 21-year age gap, yes. Is it more pronounced now than it was...
I would say yes, if I'm honest, and I'm sure he would be happy for me to be honest. He is 86. The one or two little mobility, not issues, but mobility restrictions, should we say. So, for instance, getting out the wrong side of the Kings Road, the wrong side of Putney Bridge in the Kings Road is challenging if he's not in the right shoe. He needs a proper...
walking shoe rather than and he was in a casual shoe because he'd been doing something he's been working into his 80s quite a lot i mean that is the stuff he's been doing with jack traveling so he's obviously fit and feels up for the challenge of taking on those things Yes, he does.
I think we've had one or two issue back issues recently because he's done a couple of ludicrous things like deciding to move a piece of furniture, which has then impacted the lower back, which, as you know, once you've got lower back, it's bad enough when you're younger. But when you're 85 trying to shift a lower back, it's more problematic. Right. So there are one or two things impacting now.
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Chapter 5: What role does physical fitness play in Hilary's life?
Are you good at?
being a a nurse i was going to say kind of a caring wife in the physical sense or i'm quite impatient i'll be honest i i'm very much of the come on get on with it now take a couple of paracetamol and get on with it but you're going to have to your patients will be tested a little bit more won't it absolutely absolutely but is that something you think about when you marry somebody i never thought a lot older than you actually i never thought about it i i
literally met Michael and we hit it off pretty much immediately I mean there was a slight false start because he thought I was married and for various reasons I thought he was gay which was not a great start but once we got over that two barriers to success yes we were fine Once we went on the double date with his then client Martin Jarvis and his wife, we were fine. We were off and running.
You went as an actress to get representation, didn't you? I did, yeah. When we met, he was looking for a wife, I was looking for an agent. I think he got the better deal. Did he get you much work? Because when he was my agent, he never got me any work because he wanted me at home cooking dinner. He turned down all sorts. Gladiator. Films were coming across his path.
Did work immediately cease to be as important because you'd found your man and your other person and this was something?
I was still quite ambitious I think that the turning point for me in terms of things work taking a slight second a back seat was because I had married someone older who had not had children but wanted children I had to get on with it we had a couple of false starts beforehand which was annoying and there was quite took me quite a long time to get pregnant between each one
Then finally I had Jack, and then I said to him, look, because we've had these issues, when I stop breastfeeding, maybe at six months, we probably need to get on with it. Little did I know that we were nearly up to six months. I was already pregnant. So we had two very close together, and then I wanted another one, and I thought, well, get on with it. So I had three under four.
I don't know what your age span is. Well, I've got twins, so 16 minutes. Oh, yes, okay. But my mum had our first three, there were four of us, and she had the first three within three years. Yes, it's quite tough. I mean, it's two cots and two high chairs, and everyone's in nappies, but then they sort of move as a rump. You seem like a very capable woman. I was from capable stock.
My mother was very capable. My mother had a very in many ways a sad life because she was an only child and she was orphaned by the time she was eight. So her mother died when she was two and her father died when she was eight. And she was then immediately packed off to boarding school and lived with a sort of branch of the family that were.
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Chapter 6: How does Hilary navigate the dynamics of family relationships?
Took time out when he needed to act. And slightly more flexible lifestyle, being your own boss, doing what he did. Absolutely. A lot of other... And also no one was in the office before 10 o'clock in those days and everyone left at six. Although there was evening work to be done with clients going to the theatre and that kind of thing. But it was a bit more flexible.
The family life seems, I mean, we know a lot more about your family life than we do a lot of other people because of Jack has used you all as part of his career.
yeah um I mean he's talked a lot about that about kind of how you know how he's done that in a way that actually you all seem to go along with very well and especially you and Michael and that has given you an opportunity to have your own platforms never parents hence midpoint I mean our midpoint well Michael's midpoint very much not a midpoint it's a sort of Exaggeration midpoint. Yes.
Mine's sort of a midpoint because, you know, we've all had a sort of complete, well, Michael, complete career change being a performer, which he never wanted to be. He just looked after performers. He didn't want to be front and centre. Exactly. He was very much a backroom boy. Yeah.
And then from my perspective, I was a sort of, you know, a jobbing actress, which meant that I didn't, I mean, I worked about 10 minutes a year, like so many actors. And then, of course, the older you get, there's less work. And
And Jack sort of reframed both of us into this whole new world of, I mean, I hate the words reality TV, but I mean, it was sort of our lives really being documented on TV, on screens. And does he take enormous credit then for your kind of latter life? I mean, he has named us the Nepo parents.
we are the Nepo parents we are very much on those coattails but loving it and now you've got the time as well because your kids are grown up and established you've got the time to enjoy this work and feel that you can throw yourself into stuff and I feel that you know my career never really got going because of you know having the three children very quickly and then
I was just forgot to say, too, that my reframe on all of that was that I was very ill after I had Molly. So I had one, too. And then I was seriously ill when I had Molly. There was a flu epidemic. I got flu. I then got double pneumonia. I then got pleurisy. I was very sick after I had her. And that made me just slightly think.
I mean, there were moments when I thought I wasn't going to survive it. How old was she at this point? She was, I mean, like weeks and months rather than... So you weren't able to immediately... No, she was born end of October, and I got this kind of beginning, sort of mid-November.
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Chapter 7: What advice does Hilary offer for managing family celebrations?
It just made me think, you know, I need to. Try and have a balance between work life and not be quite so ambitious. So it's hard for actresses. Very hard. Because of that, isn't it? I've got friends who've been in the business and it's definitely the female part of the partnership. They're both actors that has taken the hit with the career.
It's very difficult, and I think the older you get as an actress, the less work there is, and that's just a sad reality. How did you balance off the fact that you'd get rejections or you'd go for an audition, you'd never hear back? Where did you learn to put that in its perspective in one place and allow yourself to flourish? Partly because I felt that I had a job as a mother as well.
That was a job, definitely. That helped. It's interesting because the business has changed exponentially, and I have many friends who are...
agents who would say you know they're seriously thinking of maybe giving it up because in the old days as an actress you would get in a room with a casting director and a director or you know there would be an audition process where you are actually in a room and you can get a feel for each other having a relationship now done on the phone the whole thing you self-tape and you send it off if you're lucky you might get some notes back to redo it if not you never hear another thing and there's no feedback and the agents everything's done on email
i just don't whereas it was a real in-person business it was a creative industry and i don't understand how you can be creative when you're using tech to do it all a lot of my actress friends say the same thing and actor friends say the same thing and it's the it's the not hearing back it feels so rude i know not acknowledge yeah and not have that ability if the director's there to say can you just do it with a slightly you know more jovial tone can you just give me a little bit more anger in that
Or why did you do it like that? And then you get to explain your interpretation. And they say, could you just try it this way? And let alone what AI is going to do, of course, to the industry. So it feels like you might have had the best years, you and Michael, in that industry. I think we probably did.
I mean, it was also a very social industry in those days, you know, because drink was taken on occasions, you know. You could get something to eat after a show. I mean, there was a whole trade, and most restaurateurs nowadays will tell you that there's no trade after the theatre. Whereas in the old days, you'd go to the Wolseley, say, or the Ivy, and it would be ram-packed after the theatre.
All the clubs down here were in Soho as well. They would be full, wouldn't they? Because you'd have pre-dinner or post-dinner tables, wouldn't you? That's right. Even people going to see, let alone the actors and the actresses in the plays. So, yeah, when you think about it now, it's a whole different landscape. People just don't go out that late anymore, do they?
No, eat before, see the show, go home. People make a virtue of having a table at six o'clock. They get very excited, even if they haven't got to go to the theatre afterwards, so they can be home in bed for ten. What's happened to us? So you look back on that life, it must feel... It's very different.
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Chapter 8: How does Hilary reflect on her children's careers and aspirations?
Anyway, so I've got this amazing footage. And you've had it transferred now. And I've had it transferred, so it's in the cloud. And I did a sort of montage of Nigel Havers, our best man, arriving late. But they're moving in normal, not like cine film where people moved like this. No, no, it's actually a bit fuzzy. Well, we had these huge master tapes from our wedding, which went missing.
I watched them only once. So you don't have them? No, I've been through everything. I've gone through boxes and boxes. I thought they were in, VHS boxes, and they've disappeared. And they've got to be somewhere. All I can think is maybe accidentally they've got taken to a charity shop or something. And somebody somewhere is going, who are these people? Why is Gabby Logan in a wedding dress?
Yeah.
Love it. And the guy who was our cameraman was a cameraman from Sky who I'd worked with. And he'd just been on the British and Irish Lions tour to do. There was a famous kind of documentary made of the 97 tour. And then they decided to do the same thing again four years later. When he got back, his wife had left him a Dear John letter.
And it was the day after that he was due to come up to Scotland to film our wedding. So he came up full of sadness and feeling like a wedding. Yeah. And so there were quite a lot of, you know, in Love Actually, where, you know, the video at the wedding is kind of like going, kind of focusing way too much on Keira.
There were bits where he just goes off to a piece of heather in the distance and you can hear him almost crying. So it's quite the piece. But unfortunately, I haven't got it. Got it. So so let's talk a little bit about the changing, not just your professional life, but as you're entering another change in life. Big change. Yeah. With these four little people. Yeah.
How I imagine it's just the most joyous thing. It is joyous, but interestingly, I find the responsibility of somebody else's children, albeit that they're connected to me, I find it overwhelming. You know, if I've got, you know, any of them overnight or for the weekend or when I had the two little girls, I had Peggy and Elsie for the weekend.
I find it overwhelming, the responsibility of looking after your children's children. I love it. Are you good at following their rules? Fortunately, my daughter is quite relaxed and her husband quite relaxed. And Peggy is quite a character, as indeed is her son, Woody. So I'm quite a strict grandmother. I do insist on manners. Very big on that, as is Michael.
So there's a lot of, I'm not hearing the right word here. I need the P word. I'm not hearing it. And then what do we say? We say thank you. Well done. How old are they? So Peggy's five. Woody is two and a half, nearly three. Elsie's two and a half. And then Billy is 12 weeks. And Billy's had, they've had quite a journey with Billy because he's had, you know, dreadful reflux.
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