Mackenzie Crook - Crook was born in Maidstone, Kent, England, and grew up in Dartford. His father, Michael Alan Crook, worked for British Airways and his mother, Sheila, was a hospital manager and teacher. He has two sisters. As a child he collected stamps, Toby jugs and Star Wars figurines and would venture to ponds collecting amphibians and vegetation which he would often take home, store in his room, and paint. One of his schoolteachers once described him as "A small, quiet child with a great interest in the natural world". When he was ten years old, he was put on a course of hormone therapy for a year due to a growth hormone deficiency. He went to Wilmington Grammar School for Boys, and did his first seven plays there.
Crook joined the Orchard Youth Theatre in Dartford when he was about 15 years old and gained his inspiration for acting and song. In the summers he spent time with his uncle at his farm in Northern Zimbabwe where he developed a love for basketball and painting and grew with an ambition to be a graphic artist. As an adolescent he copied a painting of The Soul Of A Rose, by John William Waterhouse, onto his bedroom wall and the back of his biker's jacket and commissioned a painting of the album cover from Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell on a former manager's jacket. He also greatly admired Kurt Cobain, grew his hair long, grew a beard, wore ripped jeans and an earring and started a heavy metal band called Up and Over, but dropped it after deciding his voice was too high, even though his keyboard and guitar performances earned him critical acclaim. Even as a teenager, he was still small for his age due to his growth hormone deficiency; accessing pubs and adult-rated films with his friends and family was a difficult task as he was often not believed to be over 16 or 18 years old.
When Crook was 18 years old, he applied to the Kent Institute of Art & Design three times but failed to secure a place on each attempt. He spent a while doing part-time jobs in a publishers, a library, a hospital, a fruit stall, a chicken factory, a brewery, a florist, a Chimney Sweep, Halfords and Pizza Hut before he turned to environmentalism and writing comedy sketches.
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