He’s the TV funny man who’s been bringing his signature wit and flair to the dance floor on Dancing with the Stars, but outside of the spotlight, Shaun Micallef is incredibly private about his home life.
So just what do we know about the relationship with his wife and children.
Is Shaun Micallef married?
Micallef gained national recognition in the 1990s as a cast member of the sketch comedy show Full Frontal. The success led to his own programs, including The Micallef Program, Welcher & Welcher, and Micallef Tonight.
He may have been making Australian audiences laugh out loud for more than 30 years, but you might not know that his rise to comedic genius only came about because of his wife, Leandra.
The pair married in 1989, celebrating their 30-year anniversary in 2019.
Speaking on a 2017 episode of the You’ve Gotta Start Somewhere podcast, Micallef admitted that after 10 years of talking to his wife about his desire to perform, she gave him an ultimatum: pursue comedy by a certain date or stop discussing it altogether.
At the time, the pair were living in Adelaide and Micallef was working as a solicitor in insurance law.
By then, he’d been doing the job for a decade.
“I had to do something by the 11th of November of that year, so it was circled on the wall calendar and I do remember where that was in the kitchen,” Micallef told podcast host Rachel Corbett. “And I was true to my word and had it sewn up by the 11th of November.
“So I packed the car and – again this is a great credit to Leandra – I had to leave. I didn’t know whether it would work so she stayed in Adelaide and I went to Melbourne.”
Micallef explained that for two years he used to commute to Melbourne to pursue his comedy dreams. Then he’d come back home every couple of weeks to see his wife.
“Until Leandra actually said to me ‘why don’t you do it?’ I never really considered it [comedy] as a possibility – as a thing that a grown-up person would do,” he explained.
Does Shaun Micallef have children?
When he first started out in comedy, Micallef had an “insatiable appetite for performing” and was “very, very needy”.
“I always needed approval, I hungered for it in a pathetic way,” he told The Father Hood.
“Talk to people I worked with early on and they’ll tell you, I was dreadful. Because I came over to Melbourne to write and had nothing else to do. Leandra was back in Adelaide, we had no children,” he said.
“I was completely focused and fixed on being a television writer. If one of my scripts was rejected I’d be frantic. It was pathological and bizarre. I think it was because I’d left it so late. I mean I was in my thirties, I felt like it was all slipping away.”
But then Micallef and his wife – a lawyer who also went on to own Melbourne design store Ziggurat – had kids – three sons now aged in their 20s – and everything changed.
“For me the breakthrough was the realisation that I wasn’t the centre of the universe or even the centre of my own world,” Micallef told The Father Hood. “That you and your work, your living, are not the only reason you’re here. Your role is to shepherd your children through to adulthood. That’s the point of life. Your own little sessions and needs and passions are just there to flavour you and help you do that job for your children.”
Where does Shaun Micallef live?
Today, Micallef and his wife Leandra live in Williamstown, Victoria. Micallef enjoys daily walks in the park overlooking the water with his dog.
“There’s something about being on the edge, right by the coast, that’s quite appealing,” Micallef said in a November 2024 interview with The Guardian. “And yet I won’t swim. I don’t think I’ve gone in the water. Ever. I don’t like immersing myself in the water. I like looking at it.”
In the same interview, the comedian revealed how the end of his comedy news show Mad As Hell in 2022, gave him time to travel with his wife and to “reassess what I had left to do”.
What happened to Shaun Micallef?
Micallef’s latest endeavours have been his involvement in the ABC comedy talk show Eve of Destruction and Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey on SBS, which sees him join six comedians as they undertake transformational journeys around the world.
“I’m 63 next year. I can feel that the hunger I used to have has turned into a taste for it rather than a real need to do it any more … so I’ve chosen to do things that either I mucked up first time around … or that I’ve never done before,” Micallef told the publication. “I feel like I’m in the service of others rather than myself.”
With both his parents now in their 80s, the star also has an appreciation for the “finite nature” of life.
“All that’s done is make me try to take advantage of any opportunities that come along … you know this is not a dress rehearsal for anything – this is the show,” he told The Guardian. “Do your best act. Get off with a bow and a dignified wave before someone else pushes you offstage. Or the hook comes out.”
Start your journey to find love for FREE today, with eHarmony.
