Michael Palin
Sir Michael Edward Palin, KCMG, CBE, FRGS, FRSGS, FRSL (/ˈpeɪlɪn/ PAY-lin; born 5 May 1943[1]) is an English actor, comedian, writer, and television presenter. He was a member of the Monty Python comedy group.[2] He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013[3] and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2019.[4][5]
Michael Palin
- Actor
- comedian
- writer
- television presenter
1965–present
3
Palin started in television working on programmes including the Ken Dodd Show, The Frost Report, and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Palin joined Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974) alongside John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Graham Chapman. He acted in some of the most famous Python sketches, including "Argument Clinic", "Dead Parrot sketch", "The Lumberjack Song", "The Spanish Inquisition", "Bicycle Repair Man" and "The Fish-Slapping Dance". Palin continued to work with Jones away from Python, co-writing Ripping Yarns.[6]
Palin co-wrote and starred in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983). For his performance in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) he received the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.[7][8] Other notable films include Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (1981), The Missionary (1982), A Private Function (1984), Brazil (1985), Fierce Creatures (1997), and The Death of Stalin (2017).
Since 1980, Palin has made numerous television travel documentaries and is a widely recognised writer and presenter.[9] He has acted as a travel writer and travel documentarian in programmes broadcast on the BBC. His journeys have taken him across the world, including the North and South Poles, the Sahara, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe, and Brazil; in 2018, he visited North Korea, documenting his visit to the isolated country in a series broadcast on Channel 5. From 2009 to 2012 he was President of the Royal Geographical Society.[10]
Early life and education[edit]
Palin was born in Ranmoor, Sheffield,[11][12] the second child and only son of Edward Moreton Palin (1900–1977)[13][14] and Mary Rachel Lockhart (née Ovey; 1903–1990). His father was a Shrewsbury and Cambridge-educated engineer working for a steel firm.[15] His maternal grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Lockhart Ovey, DSO, was High Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1927.[16]
Palin was educated at Birkdale and Shrewsbury School. His sister Angela was nine years his senior; despite the age gap the two had a close relationship until her suicide in 1987.[15][17] Palin is of English and Irish Catholic heritage; he has ancestral roots in Letterkenny, County Donegal.[18] His great-grandmother fled the Irish Famine and was adopted by a wealthy English family.[19]
When he was five years old, Palin had his first acting experience at Birkdale playing Martha Cratchit in a school performance of A Christmas Carol. At the age of 10, Palin, still interested in acting, made a comedy monologue and read a Shakespeare play to his mother while playing all the parts.[20] After leaving Shrewsbury in 1962, he went on to read modern history at Brasenose College, Oxford.[1] With fellow student Robert Hewison he performed and wrote, for the first time, comedy material at a university Christmas party.[21] Terry Jones, also a student at Oxford, saw that performance and began writing with Hewison and Palin.[20] That year Palin joined the Brightside and Carbrook Co-operative Society Players and first gained fame when he won an acting award at a Co-op drama festival.[22] He also performed and wrote in the Oxford Revue (called the Et ceteras) with Jones.[23]
Career[edit]
Early career[edit]
After finishing university in 1965, Palin became a presenter on a comedy pop show called Now! for the television contractor Television Wales and the West.[24] At the same time, Palin was contacted by Jones, who had left university a year earlier, to help with writing a theatrical documentary about sex through the ages.[25] Although this project was eventually abandoned, it brought Palin and Jones together as a writing duo and led them to write comedy for various BBC programmes, such as The Ken Dodd Show, The Billy Cotton Bandshow, and The Illustrated Weekly Hudd.[26] They collaborated in writing lyrics for an album by Barry Booth called Diversions. They were also in the team of writers working for The Frost Report, whose other members included Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Vosburgh and future Monty Python members Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle.[27][28][29]
Although the members of Monty Python had already encountered each other over the years, The Frost Report was the first time all the British members of Monty Python (its sixth member, Terry Gilliam, was at that time an American citizen) worked together.[15] During the run of The Frost Report the Palin/Jones team contributed material to two shows starring John Bird: The Late Show and A Series of Birds. For A Series of Birds the Palin/Jones team had their first experience of writing narrative instead of the short sketches they were accustomed to conceiving.[30]
Following The Frost Report the Palin/Jones team worked both as actors and writers on the show Twice a Fortnight with Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Jonathan Lynn, and the successful children's comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set with Idle and David Jason. The show also featured musical numbers by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, including future Monty Python musical collaborator Neil Innes. The animations for Do Not Adjust Your Set were made by Terry Gilliam. Eager to work with Palin[31] sans Jones, Cleese later asked him to perform in How to Irritate People together with Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. The Palin/Jones team were reunited for The Complete and Utter History of Britain.[32]
Personal life[edit]
In 1966, Palin married Helen Gibbins (born October 1942), whom he first met in 1959 on holiday in Southwold in Suffolk.[15] This meeting was later fictionalised in Palin's teleplay for the 1987 BBC television drama East of Ipswich.[63] Their marriage lasted for 57 years, until Helen's death from kidney failure on 2 May 2023.[64]
The Palins' three children are Thomas (born 1969), William (born 1970), and Rachel (born 1975), and there are four grandchildren.[55] Rachel is a BBC TV director, whose work includes MasterChef: The Professionals.[65][66] William is Director of Conservation at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London,[67] and oversaw the 2018–19 restoration of the Painted Hall.[68] A photograph of William as a baby briefly appeared in Monty Python and the Holy Grail as "Sir Not-appearing-in-this-film".[69] The theatre designer Jeremy Herbert is a nephew.[70]
Palin describes his religious belief as "agnostic with doubts".[71] He has lived in Gospel Oak, London, since the 1960s.[72][73]
Palin has been a supporter of Stenhousemuir F.C.[74]
Activism and charity[edit]
Palin assisted Campaign for Better Transport and others with campaigns on sustainable transport, particularly those relating to urban areas, and has been president of the campaign since 1986.[75]
On 2 January 2011, he became the first person to sign the UK-based Campaign for Better Transport's Fair Fares Now campaign. In July 2015, he signed an open letter and gave an interview to support "a strong BBC at the centre of British life" at a time when the government was reviewing the corporation's size and activities.[76]
In July 2010, Palin sent a message of support for the Dongria Kondh tribe of India, who were resisting mining on their land by the company Vedanta Resources. Palin said, "I've been to the Nyamgiri Hills in Orissa and seen the forces of money and power that Vedanta Resources have arrayed against a people who have occupied their land for thousands of years, who husband the forest sustainably and make no great demands on the state or the government. The tribe I visited simply want to carry on living in the villages that they and their ancestors have always lived in."[77]
Palin is a longstanding Vice President of the National Churches Trust.[78]
Palin is a co-founder of The Michael Palin Centre for Stammering.[79] When it opened in 1993 Palin became Vice President of Action for Stammering Children. Palin's awareness and understanding of stammering stemmed from his father’s experience as a person who stammers. Over the years Palin has provided support and connection to young people and families of people who stammer.
Palin was instrumental in setting up the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children in 1993.[87] Also in 1993, each member of Monty Python had an asteroid named after them. Palin's is Asteroid 9621 Michaelpalin.[88] In 2003, inside the Globe a commemorative stone was placed – Palin has his own stone, to mark donors to the theatre, but it is misspelt as "Michael Pallin". The story goes that John Cleese paid for the stone, and mischievously insisted on misspelling his name.[89]
In honour of his achievements as a traveller, especially rail travel, Palin has two British trains named after him. In 2002, Virgin Trains' new £5 million high-speed Super Voyager train number 221130 was named Michael Palin – it carries his name externally and a plaque is located adjacent to the onboard shop with information on Palin and his many journeys.[90] Also, National Express East Anglia named a British Rail Class 153 (unit number 153335) after him. (He is a model railway enthusiast.[91])
In 2008, he received the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society in Dublin. In recognition of his services to the promotion of geography, Palin was awarded the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in March 2009, along with a Fellowship of this Society (FRGS).[92]
In June 2013, he was similarly honoured in Canada with a gold medal for achievements in geography by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.[93] In June 2009, Palin was elected for a three-year term as President of the Royal Geographical Society.[94][95] Because of his self-described "amenable, conciliatory character" Michael Palin has been referred to as unofficially "Britain's Nicest Man".[96] In a 2018 poll for Yorkshire Day he was named the greatest Yorkshireman ever, ahead of Sean Bean and Patrick Stewart.[97]
In September 2013, Moorlands School, Leeds, named one of their school houses "Palin" after him.[98] The University of St Andrews awarded Palin an honorary Doctor of Science degree during their June 2017 graduation ceremonies, with the degree recognising his contribution to the public's understanding of contemporary geography.[99] He joins his fellow Pythons John Cleese and Terry Jones in receiving an honorary degree from the Fife institution.[100] In October 2018, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society awarded Palin the first Louie Kamookak Medal for advances in geography, for his book on the history of the polar exploration vessel HMS Erebus.[101]
Palin was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2000 New Year Honours for "services to television drama and travel documentaries".[102] He then was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in the 2019 New Year Honours for "services to travel, culture and geography". Palin is the only member of the Monty Python team to receive a knighthood.[103]
In 2017, the British Library acquired Palin's archive consisting of project files relating to his work, notebooks, and personal diaries. The papers in the archive (Add MS 89284) relate to his work with Monty Python, his later TV work, and his children's and humorous books.[104]
BAFTA Awards
Other awards