Stephen Mangan

Stephen James Mangan is a British actor, comedian, presenter, and writer born on 16 May 1968 in Ponders End, Enfield, in north London, to Irish parents. He has two younger sisters. Mangan attended Lochinver House School for boys in Potters Bar and later Haileybury and Imperial Service College, a boarding school in Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire. During his school years he was a member of a prog rock band called Aragon, which recorded an album titled The Wizard's Dream. He went on to study law, earning a Bachelor of Arts from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he appeared in 21 plays, though he did not join the Cambridge Footlights. He took a year away from his studies to care for his mother, Mary, who died of colon cancer at the age of 45. Shortly after her death, Mangan auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he trained for three years, graduating in 1994.

Following his graduation from RADA, Mangan chose to focus on stage work rather than screen roles, performing in productions across the UK and the West End between 1994 and 2000. He subsequently joined the theatre company Cheek by Jowl for an international tour of Much Ado About Nothing, a role that earned him a nomination for a National Theatre Ian Charleson Award. He later worked with director Declan Donnellan again at the Royal Shakespeare Company in School for Scandal, and appeared at the Savoy Theatre in Hay Fever.

In 2008, Mangan played the title role of Norman in The Norman Conquests, directed by Matthew Warchus, first at the Old Vic in London and then at the Circle in the Square on Broadway. The production transferred to Broadway in 2009, where Mangan appeared in all three parts of Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy: Round and Round the Garden, Living Together, and Table Manners. The production received multiple Tony Award nominations, including one for Mangan himself, and won the Tony Award for Best Revival. Mangan also received a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance for his work in the trilogy. Originally from London, England, he remains one of the relatively few British stage actors to have earned both a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award for a single Broadway engagement.

In 2012, Mangan appeared at the Royal Court in Birthday, a play by Joe Penhall directed by Roger Michell, in which he played a pregnant man. The following year he took on the role of Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End, opening in October 2013. That production won the 2014 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy.

On television, Mangan first gained wider attention playing Adrian Mole in the six-part BBC series Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years in 2001. He appeared as Dan Moody in the I'm Alan Partridge episode "Bravealan" in 2002, and went on to play Guy Secretan in the Channel 4 sitcom Green Wing. He starred as Seán Lincoln in Episodes, the British-American comedy series created by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik, which premiered simultaneously on Showtime in the United States and BBC Two in the United Kingdom in January 2011. He played the title role in the BBC comedy detective series Dirk Gently, based on characters from Douglas Adams's novels and created by Howard Overman, which ran for four episodes before being cancelled. He also portrayed Tony Blair in the one-off Comic Strip Presents episode The Hunt for Tony Blair, which aired on Channel 4 on 14 October 2011 and received a BAFTA nomination for Best Comedy Programme in 2012.

In 2018, Mangan co-wrote and starred in Hang Ups for Channel 4, adapted from the American series Web Therapy, featuring a cast that included David Tennant, Katherine Parkinson, Charles Dance, and Richard E. Grant. That same year he played Andrew, a fraudulent travel writer, in the Sky One black comedy Bliss, created by David Cross, and began his role as Nathan Stern in the BBC legal drama The Split opposite Nicola Walker, a part he reprised in the second series in 2020 and the third in 2022. Also in 2018, Mangan began presenting Artist of the Year on Sky Arts, a role he has continued since. He voiced Bigwig in Watership Down and played Postman Pat in Postman Pat: The Movie. In 2020, he co-hosted BBC Children in Need alongside Mel Giedroyc, Alex Scott, and Chris Ramsey, and narrated the ITV documentary series Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?: The Million Pound Question. In May 2022, the BBC announced he would serve as one of the guest presenters taking over Richard Osman's role on Pointless. That same year he narrated the Channel 5 documentary 'Allo 'Allo! Forty Years of Laughter, and in 2023 he narrated three further Channel 5 documentaries: Keeping Up Appearances - 30 Years Of Laughs, One Foot in the Grave - 30 Years Of Laughs, and Birds of a Feather - 30 Years Of Laughter. In 2024, Mangan hosted Series One of The Fortune Hotel.