Wayne Brady, 50, is a successful comedian and media personality who rose to fame in the late ’90s. He landed his own variety show, on which he cracked jokes, interviewed celebrities, and even sang every once in a while, called The Wayne Brady Show, in 2001. It aired as as a primetime variety series and then a syndicated daytime series until 2004.
He then found long-lasting success in 2013 when he was cast on the American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? in 2013 and then Let’s Make A Deal in 2020. He also got to show off his singing chops on the second season of The Masked Singer, which he won. He noted that his teenage daughter, Maile, and her mother, his ex-wife, Mandie Taketa, originally gave him the courage to sign up for the show.
Maile is the only child of Wayne, although he has been married twice. He first wed Diana Lasso in 1993, and they separated just two years later. The Dancing with the Stars Season 31 contestant was then married to Mandie between 1995 and 2007. Read on to learn more about Wayne’s exes and their marriages.
Diana Lasso
Wayne and Diana married young, which Wayne said was the reason for their demise. “My first wife is a great person, but you should not be getting married when you’re 20 or 21 because you still don’t know yourself. I think the lesson was not to rush into things,” he told Closer Weekly in 2019.
There is very little else known about their marriage, considering is was short-lived and before Wayne became a star. Diana does not live her life in the limelight, so it is unclear what she does with her life nowadays.
Mandie Taketa
Although Mandie, 46, and Wayne have been divorced for more than a decade, the pair remain friends and even work together. The duo made headlines in 2020 when the television personality revealed they were quarantining together with their daughter, Maile, now 19, and Mandie’s boyfriend amid the coronavirus pandemic. “My ex-wife Mandie and I, we have a different and a very special situation than a lot of people that co-parent,” he told Access Hollywood in March 2020. “For the entire duration of [Malie’s] life, we have co-parented as best friends. We’ve also lived like seven minutes away from each other at the most. Right now, we live virtually next door to each other, so our quarantining is a little different, we quarantine between both of our homes and I’ve got a big backyard and lots of land, so we both share this land and this space.” He added, “Mandie, her boyfriend Jason, my daughter Maile, we are a family, so we’re like this new, nuclear family.” How sweet!
In his Closer Weekly interview, Brady praised Mandie for teaching him how to be a “better man” and more. “I’ve learned how to become a better man and someone’s friend from Mandie, how to listen, and when you have someone who’s truly on your team, that you need to be grateful,” he recalled. “She’s someone who knows me better than my family, who always has my back, and we hope the way we co-parent can be a model for others.”
Wayne shared the same sentiment in an interview with Us Weekly in Nov. 2019. “[Mandie] is the most amazing woman in the world and one of the most amazing moms, I think, that has ever walked the planet,” he gushed. “Our daughter’s proof of that and the fact that she slaps me into shape. She’s the reason I think that I’ve had the success I have.”
Maile was 3 years old when her parents separated in 2006. Luckily, it was an amicable divorce. “The split is very amicable and they continue to remain the best of friends and committed parents,” Wayne’s representative told PEOPLE at the time.