Former EastEnders actress Hannah Waterman has a new life on the other side of the world after she left Albert Square and relocated to Australia.
The 46-year-old is best known for her role on the BBC One soap as Laura Dunn, Ian Beale’s third wife who met a grisly end after tripping over a toy and falling down the stairs in 2004.
She had made her debut in 2000, when her character was hired as nanny to Ian’s three children - Peter, Lucy and Steven - and the couple eventually exchanged vows in 2001, followed by a good old knees up at the Queen Vic.
However, their tumultuous relationship hit the skids when Laura discovered Ian had been paying Janine Butcher for sex, and the women began a bitter feud that would eventually lead to Janine being accused of murder.
They had a heated showdown the night before Laura fell to her death, with Pat Butcher discovering Laura’s body at the bottom of the stairs.
However, Pat was still furious after discovering Janine’s involvement in Barry’s death, and even though she knew Laura’s death was an accident, she refused to provide her step-daughter with an alibi.
After leaving the soap in 2004, Hannah went on to star in other TV shows including the BBC One daytime soap Doctors, ITV drama series The Bill, as well as her dad Dennis Waterman’s hit show New Tricks.
Hannah was previously married to EastEnders co-star Ricky Groves, who played unlucky-in-love mechanic Gary Hobbs, but the couple split in 2010 after she reportedly revealed she had been unfaithful.
They separated shortly after the actress dropped more than three dress sizes and released her own fitness DVD, and Hannah began dating The Bill star Huw Higginson, and the couple are now parents to son Jack.
Hannah and Huw made the decision to relocate to Australia in 2014, and she’s been working as stage actress ever since.
She spoke about her family’s change of scenery in an interview two years after the big move, and confessed it was a tough decision to make as she was having big success with a recurring role on Doctors.
“Work had really started to pick up but we thought ‘well, if we delay it again we just won’t do it’, so we thought we’d give it a year,” she told The Daily Telegraph Australia, before admitting a year ‘wasn’t long enough’.
Since moving Down Under, Hannah has bagged herself coveted theatre roles, and even appeared as Madam Hooch, Dolores Umbridge and Aunt Petunia in the Australian production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2019, before leaving the role in February last year.
Her life is a far cry from her character’s grim life on Albert Square, and she ruled out returning to the UK.
“I couldn’t take him back to the UK now, he’d never cope,” she joked.
