All About Comedian Sarah Millican’s Husband Gary Delaney & Her Ex
Sarah Millican is known for not holding back in her stand-up routines. All areas of her personal life — including relationships past and present — are fair game.
The English comedian recently released her first Netflix special, Sarah Millican: Late Bloomer, and she covers her awkward teenage years and more with unflinching honesty. Late Bloomer arrives after her steady rise in fame, which began when she was voted best newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008. It was actually Millican’s divorce from her first husband that inspired her to get on stage in the first place. Millican was working in a job center before she turned her heartbreak into comedic material.
Millican has since found love again with a fellow comic, Gary Delaney, who’s also referenced frequently in her routines. Swooon is breaking down everything you need to know about Millican’s current marriage and ex, Andrew Millican.
Who is Sarah Millican’s husband?
Like his wife, Delaney is a well-known, award-winning English comedian. He’s become famous for his quotable, deadpan one-liners, which he’s delivered during a number of TV and radio appearances. Per his website bio, Delaney’s “Nine Minutes of One-liners” on Live at the Apollo has been viewed over 60 million times online. He’s also written for TV shows and other comedians, and published a book called Pundamentalist: 1,000 jokes you (probably) haven’t heard before.
Delaney met Millican at her second-ever show in 2006, which the latter shared during an episode of BBC 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2014. The couple didn’t live together until they married in 2013. “I moved out of my rented flat that I’d be in for six years and bought a house like an adult,” Millican told Alan Carr on his show. “It’s big stuff, we’ve been together for seven years.”
“I just got sick of taking the bins out,” she continued. “For so long I killed my own spiders and now somebody else kills the spiders.”
Who is Sarah Millican’s ex-husband?
Though Millican has brought up her ex, Andrew, during her shows, not much is known about him. The comedian said that she married Andrew in 1997 and got divorced from him in 2004.
“I suppose getting married at 22 is quite young, but I was very much swept off my feet,” she recalled when she was touring Late Bloomer last year. “I think the main reason I said yes to go out with him in the first place was the fact that he wrote me a poem. Nobody had written me a poem before, nobody has written me a poem since. I don’t really know much about poetry, but I know that this was just lovely.”
Nine years after their divorce, Millican noted, she Googled one of the lines Andrew wrote and discovered that they weren’t his words at all. It was written by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “I felt sort of broken, like my heart had been broken all over again,” Millican said.
In her 2017 book, How to be Champion, Millican shared that their split still affected her. “At the moment, I cry daily,” she wrote, per The Mirror. “At random times. I’ve had a counsellor for a long time and will always, because I find them sort of helpful, and I’m really interested in how my brain works… It’s been a few years now. When I got divorced, I knew I needed someone to talk things out with, I didn’t really want to. I wanted to work through stuff so that if I ever again was in a position to meet somebody new, I wanted to be ready and I would be in a good mental place.”
Why did Sarah Millican and Andrew Millican divorce?
In her book, Millican described how Andrew “got up and left” her. She said he told her that he didn’t love her. After that, Millican moved back in with her parents, where she remained for two and a half years. She’d also go on to begin her comedy career a little while later.
During an interview with The Sun in 2012, she reflected on her breakup. In the aftermath, Millican joined a workshop for aspiring poets before finding her way into the comedy circuit. “Can you imagine if he hadn’t left me? I’d still be in a job I hated, watching telly in a damp flat. I had to go really low to come back up,” she said.
She explained, “I was happy because, at the time, that wasn’t how I saw it. I was in a flat, I had a job, I got to watch telly — just remove the words damp and hated and it becomes something quite positive.”
The aforementioned counselor also played a role in inspiring her to take the stage. “What I didn’t want was to take all this emotional baggage into my next relationship,” Millican said. “She was brilliant and kept telling me that what I’d just said was actually really funny, and might make a joke. I was going through this horrible time, but sometimes finding funny things within it.”
Sarah Millican: Late Bloomer, Streaming Now, Netflix
