Mark Gatiss (born 17 October 1966) is an English actor and writer. He is best known as a member of the comedy team The League of Gentlemen, and is one of only three people to have both written for and acted in Doctor Who.
Gatiss was born in Sedgefield, County Durham, England. He currently lives in Islington, London, with his partner Ian and their dog Bunsen. In 2006, Gatiss was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by the University of Huddersfield.
He is best known as a member of the sketch comedy team The League of Gentlemen (along with fellow performers Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and co-writer Jeremy Dyson), which initially began as a stage act in 1995, transferred to BBC Radio 4 as On the Town with the League of Gentlemen in 1997 and then arrived on television on BBC Two in 1999. The latter has seen Gatiss and his colleagues awarded with a British Academy Television Award, a Royal Television Society Award and the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux.
He met his League of Gentlemen co-writers and performers at Bretton Hall drama school in his late teens, which he began attending after finishing school and having spent a gap year travelling around Europe.
Outside of the League, Gatiss' television work has included writing for the 2001 revival of comic telefantasy Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and script editing the popular sketch show Little Britain in 2003, making guest appearances in both. In 2001 he guested in Spaced as a villainous government employee modelled on Agent Smith. Other acting appearances include the comedy-drama In the Red (BBC Two, 1998), the macabre sitcom Nighty Night (BBC Three, 2003), and the live 2005 remake of the classic sci-fi serial The Quatermass Experiment. A second series of Nighty Night and the new comedy-drama Funland, the latter co-written by his League cohort Jeremy Dyson, both featured Gatiss and aired on BBC Three in the autumn of 2005. He appeared as Johnnie Cradock, alongside Nighty Night star Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock, in Fear of Fanny on BBC Four in October 2006, and featured as Ratty in a new production of The Wind in the Willows shown on BBC One on 1 January 2007. He wrote and starred in the BBC Four docudrama The Worst Journey in the World based on the memoir by polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
He also took an on-screen role in one episode of Doctor Who in 2007 (Professor Lazarus in "The Lazarus Experiment"), making him only the third person — after Glyn Jones and Victor Pemberton — and the first of the new series to both write for and act in the programme. Also in 2007, he appeared as Robert Louis Stevenson in Jekyll, a BBC One serial by his fellow Doctor Who scriptwriter Steven Moffat.
He appears frequently in BBC Radio productions, including the sci-fi comedy Nebulous and The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes story The Shameful Betrayal of Miss Emily Smith. He is also involved with theatre, having penned the play The Teen People in the early 1990s, and appeared in a successful run of the play 'Art' in 2003 at the Whitehall Theatre in London. In film, he has starred in Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004) and had minor roles in Birthday Girl (2001), Bright Young Things (2003), Match Point (2005) and Starter for 10 (2006). The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse, a film based on the television series, co-written by and starring Gatiss, was released in June 2005. He also plays the recurring character of Gold in the audio revivial of Sapphire and Steel produced by Big Finish Productions.
Mark appeared in the stage adaptation of Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother at the Old Vic in London from 25 Aug-24 Nov 2007. He won much critical acclaim for his portrayal of the semi-transsexual Agrado.
Gatiss is famously a long-time fan of the British television science-fiction series Doctor Who, preferring its style from the 1970s. Much of his writing has been devoted to the series, including the BBV video spin-off series P.R.O.B.E., four novels, two audio plays for Big Finish Productions and, fulfilling a lifelong dream, two episodes for the 2005-revived BBC television series. His first, "The Unquiet Dead", aired on 9 April 2005; the second, "The Idiot's Lantern", aired on 27 May 2006 as part of the second season. In addition, Gatiss was the narrator for the 2006 season of documentary series Doctor Who Confidential, replacing Simon Pegg. (Gatiss was further replaced by Anthony Head as narrator for the third series, running during 2007.) Gatiss did not write an episode in the third season, but appeared in the episode "The Lazarus Experiment", as a 76-year-old scientist who has developed a device that makes him look younger - with horrific consequences.
Gatiss and fellow Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat are working on a pilot for a modern-day Sherlock Holmes series. The script will be delivered to the BBC in 2009. If a series is commissioned, Gatiss will executive produce while Moffat concentrates on Doctor Who.
He also wrote and performed the comedy sketches The Web of Caves, The Kidnappers and The Pitch of Fear for the BBC's "Doctor Who Night" in 1999 with Little Britain's David Walliams, and played the Master in the Doctor Who Unbound play Sympathy for the Devil under the name "Sam Kisgart", a pseudonym he later used for a column in Doctor Who Magazine. (The pseudonym is an anagram of "Mark Gatiss", a nod to the Master who often used anagrams or translations of his title as false names, and to Anthony Ainley, who was sometimes credited under an anagram to conceal the Master's identity from the viewers.)
In mainstream print, Gatiss is responsible for an acclaimed biography of the film director James Whale. His first non-Doctor Who novel, The Vesuvius Club, was published in 2004, for which he was nominated in the category of Best Newcomer in the 2006 British Book Awards. A follow up, The Devil in Amber, was released on 6 November. It transports the main character, Lucifer Box, from the Edwardian era in the first book to the roaring Twenties/Thirties. On the release of The Devil in Amber, Gatiss gave an in-depth interview to stv about his writing and comedy work.
A third Lucifer Box novel, Black Butterfly, is to be published on 3rd November 2008. In this the protagonist finds himself serving the New Queen, Elizabeth, in the cold war era, coming up against the mysterious Widows' Circle and their leader Melissa Ffawthawe.
