1. Kitty Flanagan is known for portraying Helen Tudor-Fisk in the television comedy program Fisk, which she co-created, co-wrote and co-directed.
52 Facts About Kitty Flanagan
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Kitty Flanagan spent eight years based in the UK and performing around the world and has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Just For Laughs in Montreal, Canada.
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Kitty Flanagan was born in Manly, a suburb in Sydney's north, in 1970.
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Kitty Flanagan became drawn to comedy in Grade 5 when she appeared in a school musical production of Alice in Wonderland, in which she dressed as a bunny and pretended to fall asleep during the performance.
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Kitty Flanagan attended high school at Monte Sant'Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney.
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Kitty Flanagan recalls that, as a teenager, she and her younger sister Penny would put on avant-garde performance shows involving their younger brother Michael by dressing him in tutus and giving him dance moves to do.
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At the age of 21, Kitty Flanagan road-tripped around Australia and liked Western Australia so much that she moved there and lived in the Perth suburb of Cottesloe for a couple of years and later lived in Bunbury and Geraldton.
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Kitty Flanagan occasionally read news and weather at a country radio station, waited tables and lasted only three weeks cleaning and packing crayfish in a Geraldton crayfish factory before she resigned.
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Kitty Flanagan trained and briefly worked as a physical education teacher before beginning a job in advertising.
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In 1989, Kitty Flanagan began her five-year stint as an advertising agency copywriter, creating campaigns for products such as Quik chocolate drinking powder.
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Kitty Flanagan's first attempt was a success and she then started her comedy career in 1994 doing stand-up at an open mic night at the Harold Park Hotel in Sydney.
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Kitty Flanagan had been doing stand-up comedy for six months before she was spotted in December 1994 by the producer of Full Frontal.
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Kitty Flanagan joined the cast as both a writer and performer in 1995.
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Kitty Flanagan left the show in late 1996 to concentrate on her stand-up while she continued writing and acting for television in Shaun Micallef's World Around Him, The Micallef Program, The 50 Foot Show and The Fat.
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Kitty Flanagan moved to the UK in 2001 to further her comedy career and do more stand-up.
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Kitty Flanagan performed on television in The Sketch Show as well as making numerous stand-up appearances on The World Stands Up for Comedy Central.
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Kitty Flanagan wrote for various other shows on the BBC, Channel Four and Sky Television.
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Kitty Flanagan worked with author and screenwriter Sean Condon to develop his screwball comedy script Splitsville as a hook for a television series, which later evolved into an e-book.
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Kitty Flanagan took her stand-up internationally and performed at many major comedy festivals, including Edinburgh, Melbourne, Montreal, Kilkenny, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
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Kitty Flanagan had three months worth of work lined up in Australia and more kept coming in so she decided to stay.
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Kitty Flanagan starred in the Comedy Channel's 2009 TV special I Can't Believe It's Not Better before joining The Project for segments on trending news topics.
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In 2010, Kitty Flanagan toured Australia with her stand-up comedy show Charming and Alarming.
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Kitty Flanagan toured with her sister and show co-star Penny Flanagan and tour manager and former Full Frontal co-star Glenn Butcher, the founding member of the 1980s Newcastle comedy troupe the Castanet Club.
24.
In 2013, while in Montreal to perform Hello Kitty Flanagan, she appeared as a guest comedian on a television special hosted by Wil Anderson called Wil Does Montreal: Just For Laughs which explored what goes on behind the scenes of Montreal's Just for Laughs international comedy festival and featured some of the world's best-known comedians.
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Kitty Flanagan resigned from The Project in August 2014 but stayed for four months to finish the year.
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For two weeks during the end of 2014 and early 2015, Kitty Flanagan was a stand-in for Annabel Crabb's weekly newspaper column for Fairfax Media.
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In February 2015, Kitty Flanagan was the third ambassador for the Adelaide Fringe, succeeding singer Katie Noonan and inaugural Adelaide Fringe ambassador and comedian Paul McDermott.
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Kitty Flanagan is an advocate of writing and writers in the screen industry.
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Kitty Flanagan sponsored the Best Narrative Award at the 2015 Heart of Gold International Short Film Festival in Gympie and was one of the judges for the film scripts in that category.
30.
Kitty Flanagan began an Australian national tour of her fourth standup show, Smashing, the same year.
31.
In March 2018, Kitty Flanagan released a book of personal and professional autobiographical stories called Bridge Burning and Other Hobbies.
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Kitty Flanagan announced her departure from The Weekly With Charlie Pickering during the final episode of season four, but returned for The Yearly with Charlie Pickering special in December 2018.
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Kitty Flanagan has written and presented videos for clients such as Nokia and Subaru.
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An accomplished master of ceremonies, Kitty Flanagan hosted many awards nights and provided after-dinner comedy for companies as diverse as Australia Post and the Australian Pharmaceutical Association.
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In 2012, Kitty Flanagan joined a panel of writers, musicians and artists for the literary event called Women of Letters, an interactive talk that examines the lost art of letter writing and celebrates women in writing.
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In 2013, Kitty Flanagan was invited to be part of Adelaide's new literary festival called Word Adelaide, where she participated in two events during the four-day program.
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Kitty Flanagan hosted Yarn Spinning, the opening event of Word Adelaide that celebrates two long-established Australian traditions: telling tall stories and going to the pub.
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Kitty Flanagan featured in the event In Their Own Words, sharing the stage with Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame, Roly Sussex and musician Guy Pratt who performed in the bands Pink Floyd and Icehouse, to explore how the language of comedy has changed our lives and culture.
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Kitty Flanagan hosted and performed stand-up at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala in 2010.
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Kitty Flanagan hosted and performed stand-up comedy at the Opening Night Comedy Allstars Supershow to launch the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in March 2017, which then screened on the ABC and ABC iview in April 2017.
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In 2017, Kitty Flanagan co-hosted New Year's Eve: The Early Night Show with Hoot the Owl, which screened on the ABC and ABC iview in December as part of the public broadcaster's New Year's Eve programming.
42.
In 2003 while Kitty Flanagan was living and working in the UK, she joined some of the UK's top comedians for a charity fundraiser hosted by comedian Steve Coogan.
43.
Kitty Flanagan appeared alongside Ross Noble, Johnny Vegas, Simon Pegg, Tim Vine, Lee Mack, Matt Lucas, Rob Brydon, and Mark Williams in Coogan's Drugathon 2 to raise funds for the Chemical Dependency Centre and RAPt.
44.
In 2009, Kitty Flanagan performed in Sydney at the Jerry Lewis Laugh For Life charity concert to support Muscular Dystrophy Foundation Australia in their fund raising and awareness efforts to fight the muscle wasting disease.
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Kitty Flanagan appeared alongside Australian comedians Julia Morris, Paul McDermott, Mikey Robins, Peter Berner, Fiona O'Loughlin and Tom Gleeson in the fundraising gig at Sydney's Enmore Theatre.
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Kitty Flanagan has donated performances at charity and fundraising events such as Comedians Unite for the Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal to help victims of Queensland's 2011 floods, and donated half of the profits from her 2013 Bundaberg show to the Queensland Red Cross Flood Appeal.
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Kitty Flanagan is particularly fond of Delta's Classroom Canines program, which uses the principles of dog therapy to assist children with reading difficulties and helps children to be excited about reading and writing.
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Kitty Flanagan's father, John Kitty Flanagan, is an Australian author, best known for the Ranger's Apprentice and Brotherband novel series.
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Kitty Flanagan's sister, Penny, is a musician and one-half of 1990s indie band Club Hoy; she often appears in Flanagan's shows.
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Kitty Flanagan's brother, Michael, is a chef and "runs a little coffee hut at the snowfields in Japan".
51.
In 2015, Kitty Flanagan was living in Melbourne, with a Burmese cat and a dog.
52.
Kitty Flanagan reprised her role for season 5 of Utopia in 2023.