Catherine Tate

Catherine Tate (born Catherine Jane Ford, 5 December 1969) is an English actress, comedian and writer. She has won numerous awards for the BBC sketch comedy series The Catherine Tate Show (2004-2007) and has been nominated for an International Emmy Award and seven British Academy Television Awards. She played Donna Noble in the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, debuting in the 2006 Christmas special, reprising the role for the fourth series in 2008 and again in the 60th anniversary episodes in 2023.

Born in Bloomsbury, London, and raised in the Brunswick Centre, Tate never knew her father and was brought up in a female-dominated environment. She attended a convent secondary school and, after four attempts, gained a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she studied for three years. From 1988 to 1990 she toured with the National Youth Theatre production of Blood Wedding, which also starred Daniel Craig and Jessica Hynes, and she later worked at the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She chose her stage surname after the character Jessica Tate from the American sitcom Soap.

Tate began performing stand-up comedy in 1996 and co-wrote and starred in the Channel 4 sketch show Barking (1998). Following the success of The Catherine Tate Show, she starred in the spin-off Catherine Tate's Nan and the film The Nan Movie (2022). She had a recurring role as Nellie Bertram in the U.S. version of The Office, voiced Magica De Spell in DuckTales, and created and starred in the sitcoms Hard Cell (2022) and Queen of Oz (2023).