Actress Hannah Waddingham was told she didn’t have a face for television by a childhood drama teacher.
The ‘Ted Lasso’ actress, who started her career with small roles in British soaps like ‘Doctors’ and ‘Brookside’ as well as working on the West End, can still recall her teacher mocking her appearance in front of the entire class, reports Female First UK.
Speaking on BBC Radio 2 podcast ‘Rule Beakers’, the actress said: “I had one drama teacher that said to the whole class ‘Oh Hannah will never work on screen because she looks like one side of her face has had a stroke’.”
“I thought, ‘I will do. Come hell or high water, I will work on screen’,” she added.
As per Female First UK, the ‘My Family’ star admitted even her headmistress tried to stop her from pursuing a career in acting.
Hannah continued, “My headmistress said, ‘You’re bright enough to read drama’, and I said, ‘I don’t want to read drama, I want to do drama’. She refused to give me a reference, so I managed to get a scholarship for the drama school I went to and I walked back in, put it on her desk and left the room without shutting the door.”
“She was always dismissive of me because, it wasn’t that I wasn’t academic, (but) I knew what I wanted to do so it annoyed her that I turned my back on academia. So she would purposely put everyone else in the school plays and have me understudy,” the actress added.
The 49-year-old star has proven them both wrong, rising to fame in ‘Game of Thrones’ and going onto win an Emmy, Critics Choice and Screen Actors Guild Award for her ‘Ted Lasso’ role as Richmond FC owner Rebecca Welton.