John Cleese
John Marwood Cleese (/kliːz/ KLEEZ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and 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. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).
John Cleese
Actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer
1961–present
2
Ed Solomon (former-son-in-law)
In the mid-1970s, Cleese and first wife Connie Booth cowrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, for which he won the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.
Cleese costarred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Fierce Creatures (1997), both of which he also wrote. For A Fish Called Wanda, he received Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award nominations. He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981), Clockwise (1986), and Rat Race (2001) and acted in Silverado (1985), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), two James Bond films (as R and Q), two Harry Potter films (as Nearly Headless Nick), and the last three Shrek films. 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,[1] black comedy, sketch comedy, and surreal humour.[2] He was ranked the second best comedian ever in a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians.[3] 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. In 2023, he began presenting a talk show on GB News.
Career
1963–1968: Pre-Python
Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths.[17][20] 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.[17]
After Cambridge Circus, Cleese briefly stayed in America, performing on and off-Broadway. While performing in the musical Half a Sixpence,[17] Cleese met future Python Terry Gilliam as well as American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968.[17] 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'."[22] 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.[17] 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").[23]
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.[24] 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.[24][25][26] 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.[24][27]
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."[28] 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,[17] 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).[29]
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.[30]
Personal life
Cleese met Connie Booth in the US and they married in 1968.[53] In 1971, Booth gave birth to their only child, Cynthia Cleese, who went on to appear with her father in his films A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures. With Booth, Cleese wrote the scripts for and co-starred in both series of Fawlty Towers, although the two were actually divorced before the second series was finished and aired. Cleese and Booth are said to have remained close friends since. Cleese has two grandchildren through Cynthia's marriage to writer/director Ed Solomon. Cleese married American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981. Their daughter Camilla, Cleese's second child, was born in 1984. He and Trentham divorced in 1990. During this time, Cleese emigrated to Los Angeles.
In 1992, he married American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger. They divorced in 2008; the divorce settlement left Eichelberger with £12 million in finance and assets, including £600,000 a year for seven years. Cleese said, "What I find so unfair is that if we both died today, her children would get much more than mine ... I got off lightly. Think what I'd have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship—such as children, or a conversation".[114]
Less than a year later, he returned to the UK, where he has property in London and a home on the Royal Crescent in Bath, Somerset.[115][116] In August 2012, Cleese married English jewellery designer and former model Jennifer Wade in a ceremony on the Caribbean island of Mustique.[117]
In an interview in 2014, Cleese blamed his mother, who lived to the age of 101, for his problems in relationships with women, saying: "My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years." Cleese said that he had spent "a large part of my life in some form of therapy" over his relationships with women.[118] He has received treatment for depression.[119]
In March 2015, in an interview with Der Spiegel, he was asked if he was religious. Cleese stated that he did not think much of organised religion and said he was not committed to "anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think".[102]
Cleese has a passion for lemurs.[120][121] Following the 1997 comedy film Fierce Creatures, in which the ring-tailed lemur played a key role, he hosted the 1998 BBC documentary In the Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese, which tracked the progress of a reintroduction of black-and-white ruffed lemurs back into the Betampona Reserve in Madagascar. The project had been partly funded by Cleese's donation of the proceeds from the London premiere of Fierce Creatures.[121][122] Cleese said "I adore lemurs. They're extremely gentle, well-mannered, pretty and yet great fun ... I should have married one".[120]
The Bemaraha woolly lemur (Avahi cleesei), also known as Cleese's woolly lemur, is native to western Madagascar. The scientist who discovered the species named it after Cleese, mainly because of Cleese's fondness for lemurs and his efforts at protecting and preserving them. The species was first discovered in 1990 by a team of scientists from the University of Zurich led by Urs Thalmann but was not formally described as a species until 11 November 2005.[123]