John Cleese

John Marwood Cleese, born on 27 October 1939 in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, is an actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter whose career has spanned stage, television, and film for more than six decades. He is the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese, an insurance salesman, and Muriel Evelyn Cleese, née Cross. The family surname had originally been Cheese, but his father adopted the spelling Cleese when enlisting during the First World War and formalized the change by deed poll in 1923.

Cleese attended St Peter's Preparatory School, where he earned a prize for English and performed well in cricket and boxing. At thirteen he received an exhibition to Clifton College in Bristol, an English public school, where he passed eight O-Levels and three A-Levels in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Because the end of National Service had doubled the pool of applicants for Cambridge places, he spent two years teaching science, English, geography, history, and Latin at his former preparatory school before taking up a place at Downing College, Cambridge, to read law. He drew on that Latin teaching experience years later for a scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian. At Cambridge he joined the Footlights theatrical club, where he spent time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met future writing partner Graham Chapman. He contributed material to the 1961 Footlights Revue, served as registrar for the club in 1962, and appeared in the 1962 revue Double Take. He graduated in 1963 with an upper second.

His professional career began when he worked as a scriptwriter and cast member on the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths. The production performed so successfully at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was retitled Cambridge Circus and transferred to the West End in London before touring New Zealand and reaching Broadway, where Cleese made his Broadway debut in 1964. The cast also performed sketches from the revue on The Ed Sullivan Show in October of that year. Following Cambridge Circus, Cleese remained in the United States for a period, performing on and off-Broadway, including in the musical Half a Sixpence, another credit that would later be verified in his Broadway record. During that production he encountered Terry Gilliam, who would become a future Python collaborator, and American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968 at a Unitarian church in Manhattan.

Back in Britain, Cleese joined the cast of the BBC Radio series I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which ran from 1965 to 1974, and began writing for The Frost Report alongside Chapman in 1965. The writing staff on that programme included future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, as well as Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Marty Feldman, and Barry Cryer, among others. In the late 1960s, Cleese cofounded Monty Python with Chapman, Gilliam, Idle, Jones, and Palin. The group produced the television sketch series Monty Python's Flying Circus and went on to make Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975, Life of Brian in 1979, and The Meaning of Life in 1983.

In the mid-1970s, Cleese and Connie Booth cowrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty. The role earned him the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the series topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, and a 2001 Channel 4 poll ranked Basil Fawlty second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. Cleese also wrote and starred in the 1988 comedy film A Fish Called Wanda, for which he received nominations for the Academy Award, the BAFTA Award, and the Golden Globe Award, and its quasi-sequel Fierce Creatures in 1997. His other film appearances include Time Bandits in 1981, Silverado in 1985, Clockwise in 1986, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1994, George of the Jungle in 1997, Rat Race in 2001, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle in 2003, and The Day the Earth Stood Still in 2008. He played R and Q in the James Bond films The World Is Not Enough in 1999 and Die Another Day in 2002, portrayed Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 2001 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in 2002, and appeared in the final three Shrek films between 2004 and 2010.

On television, Cleese received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his work on Cheers in 1987 and received additional nominations in the same category for 3rd Rock from the Sun in 1998 and Will & Grace in 2004. A 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians ranked him the second best comedian of all time. He cofounded Video Arts, a production company specializing in training films, and was involved in organizing The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows in support of Amnesty International. A former supporter of the Liberal Democrats, he declined the party's offer in 1999 to nominate him for a life peerage.

Cleese returned to Broadway in 2005 as both a performer and book writer for Spamalot, the musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, completing a Broadway career that stretched from his 1964 debut in Cambridge Circus through that production. Born and raised in Weston-super-Mare, Cleese built a body of work across political and religious satire, black comedy, sketch comedy, and surreal humor that extended from the Cambridge Footlights to the stages of Broadway and the screens of international cinema and television.