late starters Miranda Hart


The comedian


Miranda Hart, 39, always wanted to be a comedian. She recalls doing an impression at the age of eight that made her mum laugh and thinking, “This is great! I’m funny!” But her ambitions were derailed by a politics degree and a period of agoraphobia. In her 20s she became a PA to the director of Comic Relief and put her comedy ambitions on


The entrepreneur


Hilary Devey The award-winning businesswoman, star of Secret Millionaire and Dragons’ Den’s newest panellist, left school at 16 and moved to London, eventually rising to national sales manager for TNT. In 1996, aged 39, she had the idea for Pall-Ex – a next-day delivery service for palletised freight. When the bank refused to lend her the £112,000 she needed to set it up, she sold her house and car. Today it has annual revenues of more than £100 million, with Hilary, now 54, one of the most successful self-made female millionaires in the UK.


hold. Luckily, aged 30, she braved a solo show in Edinburgh. It was followed by small parts in sitcoms, but it wasn’t until her show Miranda was commissioned in 2008 that she hit the big time. She says, “It took 20 years for me to be an overnight success.”


The newsreader Anna Ford


To several generations of men, broadcaster Anna Ford, 68, was a major schoolboy crush. So it may surprise them to discover that Anna didn’t begin her TV career until she was 30 – and then it was as a researcher. Before that, she taught for the Open University, including a stint at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. Even in 1974, bosses at Granada told her she was “too old to be a newsreader”. But a shortage of female newsreaders led to her being sent out with a film crew, and, she says, “I went from there.” She spent the next 30 years as one of the best-known news broadcasters in Britain and eventually left at 63 over a row about ageism – a long and illustrious career for a late starter.


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