Rona Munro
Born: 7th September 1959
Episodes Broadcast: 1989, 2017
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, Rona Munro's interest in creative writing
manifested while she was still a child. She was encouraged by a distant
cousin, Angus MacVicar, whose many books included the Lost Planet
series of children's science-fiction novels. Munro wrote and acted for
the stage during her teenaged years. She studied history at Edinburgh
University and became involved with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Munro
began to write steadily for the stage and radio during the early
Eighties. A period performing as one-half of the comedy duo MsFits
inspired one of her first television scripts, a 1989 installment of
The Play On One; it featured one of the first appearances of the
future Tenth/Fourteenth Doctor, David Tennant.
In 1987, Munro was invited to participate in a BBC training course,
where one of the lecturers was Doctor Who script editor Andrew
Cartmel. Having long enjoyed the programme, Munro asked to pitch ideas,
which led to the development of Survival for Sylvester McCoy's
Seventh Doctor. Broadcast in 1989, it wound up being the last story
transmitted before the BBC cancelled Doctor Who. Munro also
novelised her serial for Target Books. She continued to develop
occasional scripts for television during the Nineties, including an
episode of Casualty. Munro turned her attention to the movies as
well, writing screenplays for 1994's Ladybird Ladybird, directed
by Ken Loach, and 1999's critical darling Aimée & Jaguar.
She gave birth to a son, Danny, in 1991.
Following the turn of the century, Munro's focus was squarely on the
stage. Amongst many celebrated works were two plays for the Royal
Shakespeare Company and her award-winning trilogy of James I,
James II and James III, which debuted at the National
Theatre of Scotland in 2014. Munro also wrote the 2010 Emily Watson film
Oranges And Sunshine. Having met future Doctor Who
executive producer Steven Moffat at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006, she
was delighted when he later inquired about her interest in returning to
the programme. In 2017, Munro became the first writer to contribute to
Doctor Who in both its twentieth- and twenty-first-century
incarnations, with the broadcast of The Eaters Of Light starring
Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor. She again provided a novelisation,
which was published in 2022.
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