Jill Whelan Biography

Jill Whelan (born September 29, 1966) is an American actress.

Whelan was born in Oakland, California, and raised in Livermore, California. After attending summer acting camp at age 7, Whelan landed a series of commercials. At age 11, she was cast in the short-lived TV series Friends (a little-known 1979 series). Later that year, Whelan played the role of Lisa Davis, the sick girl, in Airplane! She is probably best known for her role in the hit television series The Love Boat, in which she played Vicki Stubing, the daughter of Capt. Stubing (played by Gavin MacLeod). After the show was canceled in 1986, she worked on an album titled Our Time.

During the early 1980s, Whelan served as a national spokesperson for First Lady Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign.

Whelan graduated from the The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, California, and continued on to college in England at Guildford College.

After returning to the United States, Whelan moved to New York City and acted in several Off-Broadway productions before leaving the stage to work as an event producer at Madison Square Garden. It was there that she met her second husband, whom she married over a decade later.

Shortly after leaving Madison Square Garden, Whelan met her first husband, Brad St. John, and was married, becoming pregnant soon thereafter. Moving back to her native California in preparation for the birth of her first son, Harrison, Whelan soon accepted another acting role on the long-running TV soap opera The Young and the Restless. She then left acting and started working as an investigative producer at the Los Angeles television station KCOP, where she remained for four years before moving back to the East Coast to get married again.

She married Michael Chaykowsky in April 2004 aboard the cruise ship Caribbean Princess. It was her second marriage. Her second son, Grant, was born on July 1, 2006.

She lived in Yardley, Pennsylvania, where she hosted a Sunday afternoon radio show on WPHT 1210 AM in Philadelphia. The show aired Sunday from 3 pm to 4 pm EST. Additionally, Whelan teaches acting to children and teens.

On September 10, 2008, Whelan appeared with several other cast members from the movie Airplane! in a reunion segment on NBC's the Today Show.

In October 2008, Whelan made her New York City cabaret debut with her one-woman show Jill Whelan: An Evening In Dry Dock at The Metropolitan Room.

From September to November 2011, Whelan appeared in the British farce Move Over Mrs. Markham at Stage West Theatre Restaurant in the Toronto, Ontario area.

Whelan moved back to Los Angeles in 2012, where she currently lives and raises her two sons. Whelan was set to replace Mark Thompson, who retired on August 17, 2012, after 25 years co-hosting The Mark & Brian Show on KLOS in Los Angeles, but during Thompson's final broadcast, co-host Brian Phelps announced that he, too, was quitting KLOS. Jill met her partner, Brian Phelps, over 20 years ago and the two have wanted to work together ever since. Phelps and Whelan will instead be co-hosting a comedy podcast at www.brianandjillshow.com. Both Whelan and Phelps share a love for improvisation comedy, and have created hundreds of characters together that they have performed both on the stage during improv shows and now in sketches performed on their podcast. The podcast launched in September 2012, and its debut was number one on ITunes.