Steven Moffat Biography

Steven William Moffat was born on November 18, 1961 in Paisley, Scotland, to Bill and Noreen Moffat. His father was the head teacher at Thorn Primary School in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, and his younger sister Gillian Penny later became headmistress of Gavinburn Primary School in Old Kilpatrick.

He attended Camphill High School before obtaining his Master of Arts degree in English from University of Glasgow, where he took part in the student television station Glasgow University Student Television.

During his student life he wrote the play War Zones and the musical Knifer, and upon graduation, served as a teacher at Cowdenknowes High School, Greenock for over three years.

Steven Moffat got a lucky break into the entertainment industry when his father, during the filming of Harry Secombe's Highway at his school, brokered a deal for him to write the script of a new series. He went on to write all forty-three episodes of the resulting ITV series, Press Gang, which ran successfully for five years (1989-93) and also earned him a 'BAFTA'.

Two years into his first series, Moffat met with producer Andre Ptaszynski to discuss a future sitcom, but the latter suggested him to write something concerning his impending divorce, which he seemed preoccupied with.

His next series, Joking Apart, which focused on "a sitcom writer whose wife leaves him", became a cult classic.

Steven Moffat's initial idea of a sitcom based on his experience of working in education eventually materialized into the 1997 sitcom Chalk, produced by Ptaszynski, which failed to live up to the hype. During the 1990s, he wrote three episodes of the anthology series Murder Most Horrid, the first of which, "Overkill", became the highlight of the series.

A fan of the Doctor Who sci-fi series since childhood, his first solo contribution to the franchise, the short story "Continuity Errors", was published in the Virgin Books anthology Decalog 3: Consequences (1996).

Later in 1998, he wrote the sketch The Curse of Fatal Death, based on Doctor Who, for Comic Relief's 1999 telethon, produced by his future wife Sue Vertue.

Steven Moffat collaborated with his producer wife Vertue on the sitcom Coupling, which was based on the early days of their own relationship and ran successfully for four seasons on BBC Two from 2000 to 2004.

During the mid-2000s, he wrote six episodes of the revived Doctor Who series, for which he won multiple 'Hugo Awards', as well as a 'BAFTA Craft Award' and a 'BAFTA Cymru Award'.

In 2007, he wrote and produced the modern-day drama series Jekyll based on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for BBC One. The same year, directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson hired him to write a film trilogy based on the famous cartoon character Tintin, created by Belgian artist Hergé.

In 2009, he succeeded Russell T Davies as the lead writer and executive producer of Doctor Who and continued to serve in that capacity until stepping down following its 2017 series. While he eventually left the Tintin script mid-way due to his commitments towards his new position, most of his writing was used for the 2011 animated film The Adventures of Tintin.

Along with writer Mark Gatiss, he co-created a contemporary series on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories titled Sherlock, which produced 13 episodes between 2010 and 2017. In 2020, he again collaborated with Gatiss on the BBC One and Netflix series Dracula, based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, and the play The Unfriend at the Chichester Festival Theatre.

Steven Moffat's first marriage was to a real estate agent named Maggie, who left him because he talked in "one-liners". He first met his second wife, television producer Sue Vertue, at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1996 and became romantically involved after being set up by their friends and colleagues.

He subsequently joined Hartswood Films, run by Vertue's mother and renowned producer Beryl Vertue He married Sue in 1999 and shares two sons with her: Joshua (born in 2000) and Louis (born in 2002).

Steven Moffat was emotionally devastated during the production of Press Gang due to the breakdown of his first marriage to Maggie. For the show's second-series episode "The Big Finish?", he created the character Brian Magboy, representing Maggie's new "boy" (lover), who often became the victim of unfortunate events in the show.