Background and career
John Marwood Cleese ( KLEEZ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and television presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report (1966–1967). In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe that created the surreal sketch comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974). Along with his Python costars Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, Cleese starred in the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983). Cleese and his first wife Connie Booth cowrote the television sitcom Fawlty Towers (1975–1979), in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, which earned him the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the show topped the BFI TV 100, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. Cleese wrote and starred in the heist comedy film A Fish Called Wanda (1988), for which he received Academy Award, British Academy Film Award, and Golden Globe award nominations, and its quasi-sequel Fierce Creatures (1997). He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981), Silverado (1985), Clockwise (1986), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), George of the Jungle (1997), Rat Race (2001), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). His prominent franchise film roles include R and Q in the James Bond films The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002), Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), and the last three Shrek films (2004–2010). He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Cheers (1987) and was nominated for 3rd Rock from the Sun (1998) and Will & Grace (2004). Cleese has specialised in political and religious satire, dark humour, sketch comedy, and surreal humour. He was ranked the second best comedian ever in a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians. He cofounded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films as well as The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. Formerly a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999, he turned down an offer from the party to nominate him for a life peerage.
John Marwood Cleese was born on 27 October 1939 in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese (1893–1972), an insurance salesman, and his wife Muriel Evelyn (née Cross, 1899–2000), the daughter of an auctioneer. His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name Cleese when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923. Cleese's grandfather, John E. Cheese, was a solicitor's clerk in Bristol. As a child, Cleese supported Bristol City Football Club and Somerset County Cricket Club. Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School, paid for by money his mother had inherited, where he received a prize for English and did well at cricket and boxing. When he was 13, he was awarded an exhibition at Clifton College, a public school in Bristol. By that age, he was more than 6 feet (1.83 m) tall.
Cleese allegedly defaced the school grounds, as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had left its plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket in the First XI and did well academically, passing eight O-Levels and three A-levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In his autobiography So, Anyway, he says that discovering, aged 17, he had not been made a house prefect by his housemaster affected his outlook: "It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect... I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world." Cleese could not go straight to the University of Cambridge, as the ending of National Service meant there were twice the usual number of applicants for places, so he returned to his prep school for two years to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti). He then took up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, to read law. He also joined the Cambridge Footlights. He recalled that he went to the Cambridge Guildhall, where each university society had a stall, and went up to the Footlights stall, where he was asked if he could sing or dance. He replied "no" as he was not allowed to sing at his school because he was so bad, and if there was anything worse than his singing, it was his dancing. He was then asked "Well, what do you do?" to which he replied, "I make people laugh." At the Footlights theatrical club, Cleese spent a lot of time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962. He was also in the cast of the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take! Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with an upper second. Despite his successes on The Frost Report, his father sent him cuttings from The Daily Telegraph offering management jobs in places such as Marks & Spencer.
Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths. The revue was so successful at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was renamed Cambridge Circus and taken to the West End in London and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue's sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show in October 1964. After Cambridge Circus, Cleese briefly stayed in America, performing on and off-Broadway. While performing in the musical Half a Sixpence, Cleese met future Python Terry Gilliam as well as American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968. At their wedding at a Unitarian church in Manhattan, the couple attempted to ensure an absence of any theistic language. "The only moment of disappointment", Cleese recalled, "came at the very end of the service when I discovered that I'd failed to excise one particular mention of the word 'God'." Later, Booth became a writing partner. Cleese was soon offered work as a writer with BBC Radio, where he worked on several programmes, most notably as a sketch writer for The Dick Emery Show. The success of the Footlights Revue led to the recording of a short series of half-hour radio programmes, called I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which were so popular that the BBC commissioned a regular series with the same title that ran from 1965 to 1974. Cleese returned to Britain and joined the cast. In many episodes, he is credited as "John Otto Cleese" (according to Jem Roberts, this may have been due to the embarrassment of his actual middle name, "Marwood"). Also in 1965, Cleese and Chapman began writing on The Frost Report. The writing staff chosen for the programme consisted of a number of writers and performers who went on to make names for themselves in comedy. They included co-performers from I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and future Goodies Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, and also Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, and Dick Vosburgh and future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. While working on The Frost Report, the future Pythons developed the writing styles that would make their collaboration significant. Cleese's and Chapman's sketches often involved authority figures, some of whom were performed by Cleese, while Jones and Palin were both infatuated with filmed scenes that opened with idyllic countryside panoramas. Idle was one of those charged with writing David Frost's monologue. During this period Cleese met and befriended influential British comedian Peter Cook, eventually collaborating with Cook on several projects and forming a close friendship that lasted until Cook's death in 1995. It was as a performer on The Frost Report that Cleese achieved his breakthrough on British television as a comedy actor, appearing as the tall, upper class patrician figure in the classic "Class" sketch (screened on 7 April 1966), contrasting comically in a line-up with the shorter, middle class Ronnie Barker and the even shorter, working class Ronnie Corbett. The British Film Institute commented, "Its twinning of height and social position, combined with a minimal script, created a classic TV moment." The series was so popular that in 1966 Cleese and Chapman were invited to work as writers and performers with Brooke-Taylor and Feldman on At Last the 1948 Show, during which time the "Four Yorkshiremen sketch" was written by all four writers/performers (the "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch is now better known as a Monty Python sketch). Cleese and Chapman also wrote episodes for the first series of Doctor in the House (and later Cleese wrote six episodes of Doctor at Large on his own in 1971). These series were successful, and in 1969 Cleese and Chapman were offered their very own series. However, owing to Chapman's alcoholism, Cleese found himself bearing an increasing workload in the partnership and was, therefore, unenthusiastic about doing a series with just the two of them. He had found working with Palin on The Frost Report an enjoyable experience and invited him to join the series. Palin had previously been working on Do Not Adjust Your Set with Idle and Jones, with Terry Gilliam creating the animations. The four of them had, on the back of the success of Do Not Adjust Your Set, been offered a series for Thames Television, which they were waiting to begin when Cleese's offer arrived. Palin agreed to work with Cleese and Chapman in the meantime, bringing with him Gilliam, Jones, and Idle.
Monty Python's Flying Circus ran for four series from October 1969 to December 1974 on BBC Television, though Cleese quit the show after the third. Cleese's two primary characterisations were as a sophisticate and a loony. He portrayed the former as a series of announcers, TV show hosts, and government officials (for example, "The Ministry of Silly Walks"). The latter is perhaps best represented in the "Cheese Shop" and by Cleese's Mr Praline character, the man with a dead Norwegian Blue parrot and a menagerie of other animals all named "Eric". He was also known for his working class "Sergeant Major" character, who worked as a Police Sergeant, Roman Centurion, etc. Cleese also appeared during some abrupt scene changes as a radio commentator (usually outfitted in a dinner suit) where, in a rather pompous manner, he would make the formal and determined announcement "And now for something completely different", which later became the title of the first Monty Python film. Partnership with Graham Chapman
Along with Gilliam's animations, Cleese's work with Graham Chapman provided Python with its darkest and angriest moments, and many of his characters display the seething suppressed rage that later characterised his portrayal of Basil Fawlty. Unlike Palin and Jones, Cleese and Chapman wrote together in the same room; Cleese claims that their writing partnership involved him doing most of the work, while Chapman sat back, not speaking for long periods before suddenly coming out with an idea that often elevated the sketch to a new level. A classic example of this is the "Dead Parrot sketch", envisaged by Cleese as a satire on poor customer service, which was originally to have involved a broken toaster and later a broken car (this version was actually performed and broadcast on the pre-Python special How to Irritate People). It was Chapman's suggestion to change the faulty item into a dead parrot, and he also suggested that the parrot be specifically a "Norwegian Blue", giving the sketch a surreal air which made it far more memorable. Their humour often involved ordinary people in ordinary situations behaving absurdly for no obvious reason. Like Chapman, Cleese's poker face, clipped middle-class accent, and intimidating height allowed him to appear convincingly as a variety of authority figures, such as policemen, detectives, Nazi officers or government officials, which he then proceeded to undermine. In the "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch (written by Palin and Jones), for example, Cleese exploits his stature as the crane-legged civil servant performing a grotesquely elaborate walk to his office. On the Silly Walks sketch, Ben Beaumont-Thomas in The Guardian writes, "Cleese is utterly deadpan as he takes the stereotypical bowler-hatted political drone and ruthlessly skewers him. All the self-importance, bureaucratic inefficiency and laughable circuitousness of Whitehall is summed up in one balletic extension of his slender leg."
