Personal Life
Gatiss was born in Sedgefield, County Durham England, where he grew up opposite the Edwardian psychiatric hospital where both his parents worked. His childhood passions included watching Doctor Who and Hammer Horror films on television, reading Sherlock Holmes and H.G. Wells, and collecting fossils. All of these interests have fuelled his creative work as an adult.
He attended Heighington CE Primary School and Woodham Comprehensive School in Newton Aycliffe; at the latter, he was two years ahead of Paul Magrs, who would also go on to write Doctor Who fiction.
He is openly gay and was featured on The Independent on Sunday's Pink List of influential gay people in the UK in 2010 and 2011. He is in a civil partnership with actor Ian Hallard, and has a Labrador Retriever called Bunsen. He once built a Victorian laboratory in their West London home, as the fulfilment of another childhood dream.
Read more about this topic: Mark Gatiss
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.”
—Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)