Background
She is best known for her role as Vicki Stubing, the daughter of Captain Stubing (played by Gavin MacLeod) in the hit television series The Love Boat.
She is best known for her role as Vicki Stubing, the daughter of Captain Stubing (played by Gavin MacLeod) in the hit television series The Love Boat.
After attending summer acting camp at age 7, Whelan landed a series of commercials. At age 11, she was cast in the short-lived television series Friends (a little-known 1979 series). Later that year, Whelan played the role of Lisa Davis, the sick girl, in Airplane! After The Love Boat was canceled in 1986, she worked on an album titled Our Time.
During the early 1980s, Whelan served as a national spokesman for First Lady Nancy Reagan"s "Just Say Number" anti-drug campaign.
She later took a role on the long-running television soap opera The Young and the Restless. On November 25, 2001, Whelan appeared on an episode of The Weakest Link, a trivia game show hosted by Ann Robinson.
Whelan competed against other celebrity television stars, including Mackenzie Phillips, Nell Carter, Cindy Williams, Joan Van Ark, Erin Moran, Erik Estrada, and Fred "Re-run" Berry. She outlasted the others, winning $57,000 for her charity.
On September 10, 2008, Whelan appeared with several other cast members from the movie Airplane! in a reunion segment on National Broadcasting Company"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 Mistress Markham at Stage West Theatre Restaurant in the Toronto, Ontario area.
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. Phelps and Whelan are instead co-hosting a comedy podcast at www.brianandjillshow.com.
Both Whelan and Phelps share a love for improvisational 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 it debuted at number one on iTunes.