Mark Gatiss (born October 17, 1966 in Sedgefield, County Durham, UK) is a British actor and writer. He is best known as a member of the sketch comedy team The League of Gentlemen, 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 BAFTA 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 writing and performing the three television seasons to date of The League of Gentlemen, his other television work has included writing for the comedy-drama revival of the telefantasy series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 2001, and Script Editing the popular sketch show Little Britain in 2003, in both of which he also made guest appearances. He has appeared purely in acting roles in such productions as the comedy-drama In the Red (BBC Two, 1999) and the macabre sitcom Nighty Night (BBC Three, 2003).

He continues to frequently appear on BBC Radio productions, and in the theatre penned the play The Teen People in the early 1990s, and in 2003 appeared in a successful run of the play Art at the Whitehall Theatre in London. In film, he has starred in Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004) and had minor roles in Bright Young Things (2003) and Birthday Girl (2001). As of October 2004, he and his fellow team-members are currently shooting a League of Gentlemen film project, provisionally titled Royston Vasey, the name of the town central to the TV series.

He is also known for his writing connected to the British television science-fiction series Doctor Who, of which he has been a big fan since childhood. He has contributed four books to the line of spin-off novels, has scripted two officially-licensed Doctor Who audio plays for Big Finish Productions, played The Master in the Doctor Who Unbound series, wrote Probe, a direct-to-video spin-off series produced by BBV, and is one of the writers signed for the revival of the series itself headed by Russell T. Davies.

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 July 2004.

He lives in London.

Novels

• Doctor Who: Nightshade (ISBN 0426203763)
• Doctor Who: St. Anthony's Fire (ISBN 0426204239)
• Doctor Who: The Roundheads (ISBN 0563405767)
• Doctor Who: Last of the Gaderene (ISBN 0563555874)
• The Vesuvius Club: A Lucifer Box Novel (ISBN 0743257065)