Oct 27, 1939

Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England

John Marwood Cleese is an English comedian and actor best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for co-writing the TV series Fawlty Towers in which he played Basil Fawlty.

He won the TV Times award for Funniest Man On TV - 1978 / 1979.
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As a boy, Cleese was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, from which he was expelled for a humorous defacing of school grounds: he used painted footsteps to suggest that the school's statue of Field Marshal Earl... ... (read more...) Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet. His talent for comedy progressed with his membership of the Cambridge Footlights Revue while he was studying for a law degree at Downing College at Cambridge University. Here he met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. As Cleese's comic reputation flourished, he was soon offered a position as a writer with BBC Radio, working on, amongst others, sketches 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 was so popular that the BBC commissioned a regular series with the same title). He then joined the Cambridge Revue, Cambridge Circus, for a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, and decided to stay on in America performing on and off-Broadway, including in the musical Half a Sixpence. It was during this time he met future Python Terry Gilliam. After his return to England, he 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. His fellow cast members were Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie, David Hatch and Jo Kendall.
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After three seasons of the intensity of Monty Python, Cleese left the show, though he collaborated with one or more of the other Pythons for decades to come, including the Python movies released in the mid-70s to early 80s - Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982), and The Meaning of Life (1983). Cleese and then-wife Connie Booth collaborated in the legendary television series "Fawlty Towers" (1975), as the sharp-tongued, rude, bumbling yet somehow lovable proprietor of a rundown English seaside hotel. Cleese apparently based this character on a proprietor he had met while staying with the other Pythons at a hotel in England. Only a dozen episodes were made, but each was truly hilarious, and he is still closely associated with this program to this day.