Comic Paul Whitehouse has secret lovechild

By Lewis Panther

COMIC hero Paul Whitehouse's split from his wife came after he had a lovechild with another woman, the News of the World can reveal.

The Fast Show star tearfully blamed the break-up of his marriage to Fiona on ‘pressure of work'.

But we can now reveal the truth—he had been having an affair with costume designer Natalie Rogers and she had given birth to his daughter Lauren on June 26, 1999, at the posh Portland Hospital in London.

Brave

Love cheat Paul— the comic genius behind the Suits You, Sir tailors and Ron Manager—is named as Lauren's dad on the birth certificate, giving his occupation as ‘writer'.

Paul, who plays all 20 characters in need of counselling in Sunday-night show Help, carried on doing a good impersonation of a happy family man.

Six months after Lauren's birth he even moved into a posh house in Highbury, north London, with Fiona and their two daughters, Sophie and Molly.

But less than a year on, Paul, 47, and Fiona, 45 (right), had split and he had moved into a nearby rented flat.

"It really did tear him up getting caught out in the way that he did, but then he shouldn't have been playing away," said a source close who worked with the star.

"He didn't want to hurt Fiona, but he was just like any bloke who thinks they can have their cake and eat it.

"Paul is fond of quoting someone who said they were happy because they were so old that when they woke up they didn't have to satisfy their sexual urges.

"He obviously hadn't reached that age when he was messing around with Natalie."

Paul was divorced from Fiona three years after he moved out, citing irreconcilable differences. And he is no longer with Natalie, who lives alone with Lauren in a flat less than half a mile away from his Islington home.

As he juggles responsibility for three children by two women, Paul has admitted that, like the characters he plays in Help, he has had counselling.

He said: "It helped me because you can talk about whatever you like and it's a shoulder, so why should I deny it?

"I know there's still a stigma attached to it, but I bet loads of people have either done it or thought about doing it."

"It's really difficult to do because you can't hide behind masks or voices and you can't make a joke about everything.

"You have to face up to things and take responsibility for your actions, which is obviously something I'll never do.

"And, no, I'm not going to tell you why I sought therapy."

In another bizarre case of life imitating art, Paul was working on Happiness—a series about a man having a mid-life crisis— while he was romancing Natalie.

Whitehouse said at the time: "I compared mid-life crises with my co-writer and we thought we'd better write about man's inability to find happiness at 40.

Happy

"Some of the characters are based, however loosely, on friends and on us. We thought about friends who were going through different degrees of middle-aged experiences.

"That's when life really comes home to roost—mortality, alcoholism, divorce, children. It all comes crashing down."

His own happy family life came crashing down in July 1999.

Friends were shocked by the break-up. "We all feel sorry for Fiona," said one. "Paul used to be so down to earth.

"He'd say he never wanted to become one of these showbiz types. But he's obviously changed."