Catherine Tate
Catherine Tate
Catherine Tateis an English comedian, actress and writer. She has won numerous awards for her work on the sketch comedy series The Catherine Tate Show as well as being nominated for an International Emmy Award and seven BAFTA Awards. Following the success of The Catherine Tate Show, Tate played Donna Noble in the 2006 Christmas special of Doctor Who and later reprised her role, becoming the Doctor's companion for the fourth series in 2008. In 2011, she began a recurring...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionTV Actress
Date of Birth12 May 1968
CityLondon, England
If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.
Writing comedy is an exposing thing because you're putting yourself on the line with every joke you write, and although you can't second-guess an audience, if you want to be successful, you have to write stuff people like.
'Writing' always means 'not writing' to me because I will do anything to put it off. I think this is mainly because writing anything down and then handing it over to a third party - especially in comedy - is such an exposing act that you naturally want to delay the process.
We say to her, 'Seriously, people will think you are taking the mickey out of them if you say that with that level of sincerity, because we don't really do that over here'.
Nothing is ever going to be as important or as exciting as a baby. Everyone has their highs and lows, but if you've got that one constant in your life - in my case, a baby - the highs are never going to be as big, and the lows are never going to be as bad.
She is genuinely adorable, but she will say to people she doesn't know, 'Have an amazing day',
I've never really thought I'd get married. It's not that I'm suspicious of it or anything like that, it's just that I don't have a reference for it because my mum wasn't.
I've realised I need a gnawing, nagging, anxious doubt when I wake at 4 A.M.
If I hadn't had a baby, a part of me thinks I might have turned up on the red carpets all the time and gone, 'Hi, it's me!' Maybe other people do it because they haven't got kids and they've nowhere else to be. But because I have, I don't feel like that.
I tried four times to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama before I got accepted. I started when I was 17, which was too young, in retrospect, and finally went when I was 21. I just kept plugging away. Determined? Yeah, I think I was.
I went from an unemployed actor's life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It's not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare's finest characters, but, hey, that's the way it has happened.
I like doing both TV and live stuff, though it's nice to mix it up.