The Real Kitty Behind the Michael McIntyre Wife Jokes

Kitty McIntyre rarely speaks in public, but her husband has recorded what she said at almost every turn of their marriage.

Kitty McIntyre, born Kitty Ward, is the youngest daughter of the late actor Simon Ward and has been married to Michael McIntyre since 2003. The couple met in a north London pub in the summer of 1996, when both were 20, and have two sons, Lucas and Oscar. They are still together, and his wife has spent most of that time as a character in his act while saying almost nothing to the press.

How Michael McIntyre met his wife, Kitty Ward

In 1996 McIntyre had left Edinburgh University without a degree and was pulling pints in St John’s Wood while producers rejected his romantic comedy screenplay. His sister Lucy came into the bar with news. Through her boyfriend she had met an actress, the daughter of a famous actor, who reminded her of the heroine of his script.

He met Kitty at the Sir Richard Steele in Belsize Park, wearing his grandfather’s cashmere coat in the height of summer. In Life and Laughing, his 2010 memoir, he points out that they had been in the same room once before, at a disco at his prep school, where he watched her dance with another boy.

When he rang the next day, she answered his introduction with ‘Who?’ Then she added: ‘I’m joking. How are you?’

Their first date ended with a kiss in her sky-blue Mini outside Odette’s in Primrose Hill. He then phoned so often that within a week she told him she was sort of seeing someone.

Two years of friendship, then a bush at 1am

They stayed friends for two years. McIntyre took a flat two roads from the one she shared with her parents and, as he told Kirsty Young on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2011, ran up record-breaking numbers of missed calls. By then he had moved from screenwriting to stand-up, and she rang to wish him luck before his first gig.

Things changed when she came to watch him in a heat of the So You Think You’re Funny? competition in Soho. A few days later, over dinner at her favourite restaurant, Villa Bianca in Hampstead, she told him: ‘I think I’m falling in love with you.’

Soon after, she went to end things in person with another man. At about 1am McIntyre, a few drinks down, walked up her road to see whether her Mini was back. When he heard it coming, he dived behind a bush in her front garden. Her footsteps stopped right in front of it, and she said his name.

‘Do you want to come in or are you planning on sleeping in the garden?’

Kitty to Michael, as he recalls it in Life and Laughing

She later told him she had to decide on the spot whether she was up for this. He stayed the night and moved in with her at her parents’ flat the next day, while they looked for a flat.

Kitty’s parents, and the grandmother who tried to split them up

The following evening he formally met her parents in their modest rented flat. Simon Ward had become a star when Richard Attenborough cast him as the young Churchill in Young Winston, according to the Guardian’s obituary, and his wife since 1964, Alexandra, was a psychoanalyst. While Simon told theatre stories, Alexandra talked over him with a list of her daughter’s qualities, from her swimming to her backhand. McIntyre writes that he has loved them both from that moment on.

His grandmother was another matter. Jealous of Kitty, he wrote, she told her he was a university dropout who had never once made her laugh. On Desert Island Discs he called it ‘quite vicious, an untenable situation’. After a final row she cut him out of her will, and she died a few months after his engagement without the two of them making up.

Broke on Fleet Road, and a proposal beside Richard Wilson

Neither had any money when they moved into a £190-a-week flat on Fleet Road. Kitty had decided against acting and worked as a nanny with what he calls horrendous hours, while he sold mobile phones for Dial-a-Mobile. When the comedy website Chortle compared him to a Marks & Spencer pullover, she told him M&S ‘stands for quality, whether it be the clothes or the food’.

Nerves plagued him before gigs, and at some point in those years, he told Kirsty Young, Kitty asked him: ‘Seriously, do you wanna carry on doing this? Are you cut out for this?’ He could not remember if they were married yet, and he kept going.

After a couple of years together he spent his last savings on a Tiffany ring and took her back to Villa Bianca. He was so distracted by nerves that she accused him of being rude, so he proposed there and then, just as Richard Wilson was shown to the next table and a waiter greeted the actor with his One Foot in the Grave catchphrase. McIntyre later turned the evening into a stand-up routine in which Kitty orders him down on one knee, and newspaper and magazine profiles have repeated that version as fact. In Life and Laughing he admits it was not what happened.

Edinburgh, then a wedding in Somerset

In August 2003, about a month before the wedding, his first solo show at the Edinburgh Fringe went a whole night without selling a ticket. Kitty came up the next day. In a Starbucks on the Royal Mile he burst into tears and told her it could not get any worse, so she pointed out of the window at a man in a nappy handing out flyers with his head through a toilet seat. ‘There’s always someone worse off,’ she said.

An Evening Standard critic was in the audience that night, and by the end of the festival McIntyre had a Perrier nomination for Best Newcomer. In late September they married in a small church in the grounds of a country house at Combe Florey in Somerset, lent by friends of her parents. Her father surprised her with a cart pulled by two ponies, and the groom forgot to mention his bride in his speech.

Their sons, Lucas and Oscar

On the day a student loan demand took McIntyre’s debts past £30,000, Kitty told him she had some good news. She thought she was pregnant. Lucas was born in June 2005. In August 2007, minutes after his agent rang to say he had missed out on a nomination for the festival’s main comedy award, she told him: ‘I have some good news. I’m pregnant.’ Oscar was born in April 2008.

The Kitty on stage and the one in his books

On stage, his wife struggles into her tights and breaks wind in her sleep. He told ShortList the second joke ‘wasn’t strictly true’ and that he thinks it upsets her when strangers ask about it. In A Funny Life he writes that she ‘was, and remains, out of my league’ and that she understands him better than he understands himself. At home he calls her Humsy, short for Best Human in the World.

He says he learned to take her advice after the 2009 BAFTAs, where he told a joke she had warned him was not funny. It died, and he calls it ‘probably the first and last time I didn’t listen to my wife’. When Michael McIntyre’s Big Show took on the Send to All phone game, it was Kitty who suggested playing it with celebrities, and when he collected his first BAFTA in May 2017 he thanked ‘most of all my beautiful, wonderful wife’.

Kitty McIntyre today

Thirty years on, the couple live in Hampstead, on the road where McIntyre grew up. They sat together in the Royal Box at Wimbledon in July 2025, and both turned 50 this year. Accounts filed at Companies House on 30 October, reported by Chortle, list Kitty as one of the two directors of Breachcroft, his performing company, as they have since 2013.

Her most recent words to the press came in June 2018, after moped robbers took his watch on the school run. She told reporters he was fine, and said no when asked whether the family feared for their safety.

McIntyre returns to BBC One on Saturday 14 November with a new series of The Wheel.

Asked on Desert Island Discs which one record he would save, he chose the song from their first dance, Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’, and described the dance itself as ‘a hug to music’.

Kitty McIntyre at a glance