Hannah Waterman is married! Actress ties the knot with The Bill star Huw Higginson in Australia

Hannah Waterman has married The Bill star Huw Higginson in Australia – five months after her famous father Dennis died.

Huw, 58, took to Twitter to reveal the happy news, writing: ‘Married my love yesterday. We had the best days.’

He shared a photo of Hannah, 47, wearing a blue patterned dress for the ceremony, as they posed on a boat in Sydney Harbor with their son Jack, 11.

Hannah happily watches her new husband as they sit on the back of the boat, her bridal bouquet in her lap.

Huw looks neat in a navy blue suit, while their son is dressed in a black suit. Another photo shared by the groom shows the couple surrounded by family and friends.

Hannah’s father died in May at the age of 74. At the time, Hannah shared a photo of the legendary TV star smiling as she cradled her in his arms as a baby.

The actress, whose mother Patricia Maynard was left by her father for Rula Lenska in 1987 after ten years of marriage, said: ‘My father! I loved him’.

Dennis was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer less than three months before his death, after a tumor was discovered in a bone in his leg after that celebratory round of golf.

Hannah bitterly split from her EastEnders colleague Ricky Groves in 2009 after he said the actress revealed she was having an affair with Huw and was leaving on New Year’s Eve.

Hannah and Huw have been dating since 2010, after a long friendship of over 10 years, revealing the star in a 2011 interview, they got close again in 2009 when they were cast opposite each other in two plays.

Hannah, who had dramatically lost two and a half stone as part of a DVD fitness regimen, was then married to Ricky, who blamed her exercise DVD for the breakup.

She made no secret of her admiration for Higginson, saying, “Marriage is beautiful in real life. When there are two of you (on stage), you absolutely have to trust each other… he is a rock in the surf.’

She left Ricky on New Year’s Eve 2009, before Huw moved to her home in Essex in June 2010 after struggling with his own marriage to Geraldine Dove-Higginson, with whom he shares a daughter.

Huw married Geraldine, a stage manager and former art director of The Bill, in 1997.

‘I’ve been friends with Huw for ten years. We first met when he played my perverted landlord in EastEnders, but we’ve been in two plays together since,” Hannah recalled in a 2011 interview about their relationship.

“Last year Huw got a little loose in his personal life and I was touring with Calendar Girls, so he stayed with me for a while. He moved in in June, and it went pretty fast from there!

“We’ve kept it quiet because we’re both quite private people. We wanted to give our relationship time to grow away from the public eye. Early on in our relationship, we talked about wanting a family.”

Higginson, who played the sweet but dim-witted cop George Garfield in The Bill, co-starred with Waterman in plays Rattle Of A Single Man and Killing Time in 2009.

Hannah is best known for playing Laura Dunn in EastEnders, the third wife of Ian Beale who was murdered by the soap in 2004.

After leaving the BBC soap, Hannah starred in BBC One daytime soap Doctors, The Bill, as well as her father Dennis Waterman’s hit show New Tricks.

Hannah and Huw moved to Australia in 2014, where she has worked as a stage actress, including in the Australian production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in 2019.

Speaking about her family’s move in 2016, she explained that moving to the other side of the world was a tough decision as she had huge success on the British coast with a recurring role on Doctors.

“The work really started to take off, but we thought ‘well if we put it off one more time, we just won’t do it,’ so we thought we’d give it a year,” she told The Daily Telegraph Australia, before explaining how a year ‘wasn’t long enough’.