Mark Gatiss turned a boyhood of Hammer Horror and Sherlock Holmes into a career
A County Durham boy who grew up across the road from a Victorian asylum, collected fossils and devoured Doctor Who, Mark Gatiss ended up writing for the Doctor, playing Mycroft Holmes and co-creating the grotesque comedy The League of Gentlemen. Nearly every childhood obsession resurfaced in his work.
Gatiss was born on 17 October 1966 in Sedgefield into a working-class family. His father, Maurice, was a colliery engineer who later took an engineering post at a mental hospital in Heighington, and the family home had earlier faced the Winterton Psychiatric Hospital. The boy's tastes ran to Hammer films, H. G. Wells and Conan Doyle's detective, and he went on to study theatre arts at Bretton Hall College, linked to the University of Leeds.
Bretton Hall is where he met Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and writer Jeremy Dyson. After a gap year travelling in Europe, he and his friends formed The League of Gentlemen as a stage act in 1995. It took the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997, moved to Radio 4 the same year and reached BBC Two in 1999, collecting a BAFTA and the Golden Rose of Montreux along the way. A feature film followed in 2005.
His partnership with Steven Moffat produced the BBC's Sherlock, in which Gatiss played the hero's cooler, more powerful brother Mycroft, and a 2020 Dracula in which he took the role of Renfield. He also wrote Doctor Who episodes and appeared in the show three times, including as Professor Lazarus in 2007. Along the way he script-edited Little Britain, played a sinister bureaucrat modelled on Agent Smith in Spaced, and turned up in Game of Thrones as the banker Tycho Nestoris.
The stage has brought the biggest prizes. He won his first Olivier Award in 2016 as Shpigelsky in Three Days in the Country, Patrick Marber's version of A Month in the Country, and a second, for Best Actor, playing Sir John Gielgud in Jack Thorne's The Motive and the Cue in 2023. He has also played George III in Alan Bennett's play about the king's madness and Jacob Marley in his own ghostly adaptation of A Christmas Carol. His awards include an Emmy and a Peabody.
Source: Mark Gatiss
