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John Cleese

Date of birth: 27-10-1939

John Cleese is one of the towering figures of British comedy, both physically and metaphorically, the respect he earned from Monty Python and for creating Fawlty Towers undimmed by the less consistent work of his later career.

Cleese was born in Weston-Super-Mare, His father, Reg, an insurance salesman had originally been called Cheese, but changed his surname when he joined the army to avoid being taunted.

John was was privately educated at St. Peter's Preparatory School; Clifton College, Bristol, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he read law and, crucially, joined the Cambridge Footlights, where he met Graham Chapman, with whom he started writing.

Although initially turned down for the troupe, he wrote for their revue in 1961, 1962 and 1963, starring in the latter two productions. It was the 1963 show, A Clump Of Plinths, that gave him and his co-stars their first break; taking the Edinburgh Fringe by storm, then transferring to the West End, Broadway, and a tour of New Zealand under the name Cambridge Circus.

After the New York run, Cleese decided to stay on in the US as an actor, with roles in such stage shows as Half A Sixpence, and trying his hand at journalism, working for Newsweek. While in America he met Terry Gilliam, who was working for a magazine called Help! (he recruited Cleese to appear in a photo-story) as well as a waitress and aspiring actress called Connie Booth, who he would marry in 1968. She gave birth to their only child, Cynthia, in 1971.

Back in Britain, Cleese was given a job as a writer with BBC radio, working on such programmes as The Dick Emery Show, and making the sketch show I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again with his Cambridge Circus co-stars. The show eventually ran from 1965 to 1974.

In 1965, Cleese and Chapman started writing for David Frost’s The Frost Report, and he also appeared on the programme, including the classic class-based sketch in which he appeared alongside Ronnies Barker and Corbett, each looking up or down on each other. Future Monty Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin were also on the illustrious writing team.

Cleese and Chapman also wrote episodes of Doctor In The House, and in 1965 were invited to work with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman on At Last The 1948 Show – the title jokingly referring to the length of time it took the BBC to commission the programme.

In 1969, Cleese and Chapman were offered their own series. But Cleese, reluctant to take the responsibility in the light of alcoholic Chapman’s unreliable behaviour, invited Palin to join them. Since Palin was awaiting an ITV commission with Idle and Jones, they came on board, too, along with Gilliam – and so Monty Python was born as an ensemble piece.

The BBC series ran for four series, from October 1969 to December 1974, but Cleese did not take part in the final run, feeling that the troupe had reached its prime.

However, he was persuaded to return for the film Monty Python and The Holy Grail in 1975, and they subsequently made Life Of Brian and The Meaning Of Life for the big screen, too.

From 1970 to 1973 Cleese served as rector of the University of St Andrews, a role he took surprisingly seriously.

Cleese managed to follow Python with an even more enduring creation, Basil Fawlty, the rude, exasperated hotelier based on a real person, Donald Sinclair. He and Booth, who co-created the series, had been inspired by Sinclair’s bizarre antics running the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, where they stayed during location filming on Python – including hiding Idle’s briefcase behind a garden wall, fearing it was a bomb.

The first series began in Septmeber 1975 – but it was four years until the second appeared, due in part to Cleese and Booth’s meticulous planning of each episode. By the time the second series appeared, the couple’s marriage had failed, but they still managed to write together.

He married Barbara Trentham on February 15, 1981. Their daughter Camilla was born in 1984, but they divorced in 1990.

In 1982 he rejoined the Pythons for their Hollywood Bowl show, and masterminded the Amnesty International benefit The Secret Policeman’s Ball, persuading many of comedy’s top stars to take part. Cleese also set up a training company, Video Arts, using his comedy talents in films designed to help workers in their jobs. The company netted him and his three co-founders a total of £42million when it was sold in the late Eighties.

He also has a keen interest in psychotherapy, and has written two books with analyst Robin Skynner: Families And How To Survive Them and Life And How To Survive It.

Outside Python, his Eighties film roles include Time Bandits, Privates On Parade, Yellowbeard, Silverado, Clockwise and Eric The Viking.

In 1988 he wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda opposite Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin, and was nominated for an Oscar for his script. But the long-awaited follow-up, Fierce Creatures, in 1996 was widely considered a disappointment.

In 1982, Cleese married Alyce Faye Eichelberger, his third blonde American wife, and they remain together to this day, spending most of their time on his Californian ranch.

In the Eighties, he also made party political broadcasts for the Liberal Democrats and the SDP-Liberal Alliance

In 1996, Cleese was offered the CBE, but turned it down.

Cleese’s notable guest appearances include The Muppet Show in 1978; playing Petrucio in a 1980 TV version of The Taming Of The Shrew; playing Q’s assistant in the 1999 James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough and Q himself in Die Another Day three years later.

He has also, lucratively, appeared on some of the most successful US sitcoms in recent years, with a one-off rols in Cheers; and recurring characters in Third Rock Form The Sun (playing Liam Neesam) and Will & Grace, (Lyle Finster).

He is known to a younger generation as Nearly Headless Nick in the Harry Potter films, or possibly as the voice of Princess Fiona's father, King Harold, in Shrek. And he is set to plays Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the 2009 revival of Pink Pather.

Cleese has also leant his voice to George Of The Jungle, Valiant and Charlotte’s Web, the video game Jade Empire, TomTom satellite navigation systems, and Eric Idle’s West End and Broadway Python musical Spamalot, in which he was the voice of God.

In 2005 Cleese toured New Zealand with a live show, but hopes this would spawn more performances around the world appear to have amounted to little, although he did take part in the 2006 Just For Laughs festival in Montreal.

He has both a species of lemur, Avahi cleesi, and an asteroid, 9618 Johncleese, named in his honour.

John Cleese: The literal-minded are the enemy of comedy

Comedy legend speaks at the launch of the Fawlty Towers play

John Cleese says he has a problem with ‘the literal-minded’ responding to his comedy, as they don’t get the jokes.

Speaking at he launch of the stage version of Fawlty Towers in London, the comic said such people should not be listened to when judging humour.

‘Whenever you're doing comedy, you're up against the literal-minded,’ he said. ‘And the literal-minded don't understand irony, and that means, if you take them seriously, you get rid of a lot of comedy.

‘The literal-minded people don't understand metaphor, they don't understand irony, and they don't understand comic exaggeration. And the result is, these are people who are not understanding what other human beings are saying, and they're not playing on a full deck.

‘Literal-minded people can only have one interpretation of what's being said. People who are not literal-minded can see there are different interpretations depending on different contexts.’

He cited the example of Til Death Do Us Part, with the bigoted Alf Garnett intended to be the butt of the jokes – although not every viewer took that away.

‘People were roaring with laughter at him, not with him,’ he told journalists, including Chortle, gathered in the West End. ‘But there were also people saying "Thank God these things are being said at last".’

Cleese – who has been an outspoken critic of ‘cancel culture’ and ‘woke’ values in the media – admitted that he had edited out some racist ‘racial slurs’ used by The Major (to be played by Paul Nicholas on stage) in adapting the 1970s sitcom.

The new stage show combines the episodes Communication Problems, The Hotel Inspectors and The Germans with a new ending tying all three together – a job Cleese likened to carpentry.

The two-hour play, which was previously staged in Australia, starts performances at the Apollo Theatre on Sunday, opening fully later in the month.

Cleese 84, praised the cast, below, and said they would be ‘tremendous’… but not until June, once the actors had relaxed into their roles.

Fawlty Towers stage cast

‘Comedy is all about timing, and what these guys have to learn in the next two or three weeks is where the audience laughs, and whether it's a small laugh or a medium sized laugh or a big laugh… it's going to be a very sharp learning curve, because you just have to take the performance to the audience,’ he said.

The comic was also co-director on the play, but said he didn’t want to be an overbearing one saying: ‘I don't like directors who behave as though they own the whole thing.

‘If you involve a lot of people in the process, everybody becomes creative, they feel much more like ‘ they're part of it. And what I don't like your directors who have a "vision", and everyone else has got to do exactly what they want. Why use the intelligence of one man, but you can have the intelligence as the whole group?’

He also said he didn’t want to dictate too much how Adam Jackson-Fox (pictured above with Cleese) plays Basil, even though it is the role he made famous.

Cleese explained: ’I think of myself as a writer who happens to perform… and if you've written a part, you don't necessarily think that only one person is ever going to play it. After all, there have been a lot of Hamlets.’

He also have a tip for comedy writing, saying scripts should take place in real time as much as possible.

Cleese said: ‘You may have a number of shortest scenes, which is excellent, but if you can cut down the number of time changes, the whole thing acquires more of a momentum, you see. So when Connie [Booth] and I were writing it, we didn't take a time change, unless we absolutely had to. We tried to make it continuous as possible.’

That surely helped the adaptation to the stage – where Cleese says this brand of comedy is best appreciated.

‘Farce is better played in the theatre than anywhere else, because once you're on television or film, then there's a guy called an editor who makes a choice about where you're looking,’ he said. ‘In a [stage[ farce, you want to sit in the middle stalls and see all the different things that are going on at the same time.’

Also at the launch, Hemi Yeroham, who plays Manuel, reveal he hadn’t watched Fawlty Towers before he got the job as he was born and raised in Istanbul.

But he said: ‘It’s a good thing as I approached it fresh. I didn't have to worry too much about fitting into something, I read the script then watched the show, and I saw that [there was a] lovability coming from Andrew Sachs, he had this natural charm… he’s just a loveable man.’

Cleese, who revealed he was suffering from vertigo at the launch, also spoke about each episode of Fawlty Towers taking six weeks to write – with not a line of dialogue written for the first fortnight as they concentrated on plot – and why there were only 12 of them

‘We felt after 12 shows that we'd done the best we could possibly do,’ he said. ‘If we did another series people would probably say "well it was very funny, but it wasn't as good as the first two series". In which case why do it if you're not desperate for the money?’

As well as the stage show, Cleese is planning a TV sequel to Fawlty Towers written with his daughter Camilla and set in a luxury Caribbean resort, run by Basil’s daughter.

• Fawlty Towers: The Play runs from May 4 to September 28 at Apollo Theatre. Tickets available here.

Published: 2 May 2024