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| Birth Name(s) : John Marwood Cleese |
Date of Birth: October 27, 1939 |
| Status:
N/A
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Partner:
Alice Faye Eichelberger |
| Profession:
Actor |
Official Site
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Full John Cleese Biography
This inspired, revolutionary group of anarchic satirists are probably second only to The Marx Brothers as the best-known comedic collective of this century. The five U.K.-born members of the group were all TV writers (Cleese, Idle, and Chapman wrote for David Frost, whom they later frequently lampooned) before concocting their own show in the late 1960s, in which they acted mainly because they thought no one else would.
Gilliam had met Cleese when the latter toured the United States in another comedy troupe; finding that Gilliam had moved to England to work as a cartoonist, Cleese recruited him to do the bizarre cutout animation for the show. Their first feature-film foray, And Now for Something Completely Different (1972, directed by their regular series helmer Ian McNaughton), consisting of refilmed sketches from their show, was met by blank indifference and befuddlement by an American public that had never heard of them. But the troupe became a cult item when episodes of the series began airing in the United States shortly thereafter; around that time a couple of Python record albums also became must-owns among collegiate cognoscenti and others in the know.
By the time their sec- ond film, the medieval sendup Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, codirected by Jones and Gilliam), opened in the States, America-or a particularly demented portion thereof-was ready for them.
The troupe's TV series ended in the mid-1970s-tall "silly walks" master Cleese had actually departed before its last season, to work on his own hysterical series "Fawlty Towers".
Cleese is the most visible Python member, appearing in many films and TV ads on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Great Muppet Caper (1981), Privates on Parade (1982), Silverado (1985, incongruously cast in a Western), Clockwise (1986), and the aforementioned Wanda (which earned Cleese an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay). He won a 1987 Emmy for his appearance in an episode of "Cheers," and provided a villainous voice for An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991). He then took a supporting role in Eric Idle's Splitting Heirs (1993). Cleese also runs a company that makes unusual, comic-oriented training films for executives. There has been a good deal of cross-pollination in the solo projects of the Python individuals, but the death of Chapman effectively ruled out the possibility of any full-scale reunion of the troupe. |
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Additional John Cleese Biography
John Marwood Cleese (IPA: /ˈkliːz/) (born 27 October 1939) is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award winning English comedian and actor. He is best known for being one of the founding members of the renowned comedy group Monty Python, and as the writer and star of the popular television comedy Fawlty Towers.
Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England to Reginald Francis Cleese and Muriel (Cross). His family's surname was previously "Cheese", but his father, an insurance salesman, changed his surname to "Cleese" upon joining the army in 1915. As a boy, Cleese was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, from which he was expelled for defacing school grounds: he used painted footsteps to suggest that the school's statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet.
Cleese was one of the script writers, as well as being a member of cast for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths, which was so successful during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that its name was changed to Cambridge Circus, was taken to West End in London, and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1964.
After Cambridge Circus, Cleese decided to stay on in America performing on and off-Broadway, including in the musical Half a Sixpence, and it was during this time he met future Python Terry Gilliam and his future wife, American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on February 20, 1968.
After his return to England, Cleese started performing as a cast member of the highly successful BBC Radio show I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which ran from 1965 to 1974. Cleese is referred to at the close of every episode as "John Otto Cleese".
Having left Python, Cleese went on to achieve possibly greater success in the United Kingdom as the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, which he co-wrote with his wife Connie Booth. The series won widespread critical acclaim and is still considered one of the finest examples of British comedy, having won three BAFTA awards when produced and recently topping the British Film Institute list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. The series also featured Andrew Sachs as the much abused Spanish waiter Manuel ("...he's from Barcelona"), Prunella Scales as Basil's fire-breathing dragon of a wife Sybil, and Booth as waitress Polly. Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real person, Donald Sinclair, whom he encountered in 1970, when he and the rest of the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming Monty Python's Flying Circus. Cleese was reportedly inspired by Sinclair's mantra of "I could run this hotel just fine, if it weren't for the guests." He later described Sinclair as "the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met", although Sinclair's widow has since said her husband was totally misrepresented in the comedy.
In 1988 he wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda, as the lead, Archie Leach, along with Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline and Michael Palin. Wanda became an incredible success, and Cleese was nominated for an Academy Award for his script. Cynthia Cleese starred as Leach's daughter.
Chapman was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1989; Cleese, Michael Palin, Peter Cook and Chapman's partner David Sherlock, witnessed Chapman's passing. Chapman's death occurred one day before the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of Flying Circus with Jones commenting, “the worst case of party-pooping in all history.” Cleese gave a stirring eulogy at Chapman's memorial service, in which he "became the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'fuck'".
With Robin Skynner, the Group Analyst (Group Analysis) and family therapist, Cleese wrote two books on relationships: Families and how to survive them, and Life and how to survive it. The books are presented as a dialogue between Skynner and Cleese.
In 1999, Cleese appeared in the James Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough as Q's assistant, referred to by Bond as R. In 2002, when Cleese reprised his role in Die Another Day, the character was promoted, making Cleese the new quartermaster (Q) of MI6.
He is currently an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, his term having been extended until 2006. Although he makes occasional, well-received appearances on the Cornell campus, he lives in the town of Montecito, California. He has also been appointed a Provost's Visiting Professor through 2009.
In 2007, he started filming the sequel to The Pink Panther, titled The Next Pink Panther with Steve Martin and Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai.
On September 27, 2007, The Podcast Network announced it had signed a deal with Cleese to produce a series of video podcasts called HEADCAST to be published on TPN's website. |
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| I think there's much more fear now than there used to be, much more fear of failure. |
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