John Sessions

John Sessions (11 January 1953 – 2 November 2020), born John Marshall, was a British actor and comedian.

He was known as a regular performer on comedy improvisation show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, as co-creator, co-writer and co-star of the sitcom Stella Street, as a panellist on QI, and as a character actor in numerous films, both in the UK and Hollywood.

John Sessions was born John Marshall on 11 January 1953 in Largs, Ayrshire, Scotland.

His father was a gas engineer.

He had an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Maggie.

His family moved to Bedford, England when he was aged 3.

Sessions was educated at Bedford Modern School, an independent school for boys (now co-educational), and Verulam School, St Albans, followed by the University College of North Wales in Bangor, from which he graduated with an MA in English literature.

At university, he had begun to appear to audiences with his comedy in shows such as "Look back in Bangor" and "Marshall Arts".

He later studied for a PhD on John Cowper Powys at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, although he did not complete the doctorate.

This period in his life was unhappy.

Sessions attended RADA in the late 1970s, studying alongside Kenneth Branagh; the two would work together on many occasions later in their careers.

His name change occurred when he became a performer, owing to the presence of a John Marshall already on the Equity register.

In the early 1980s, he worked on the small venue comedy circuit with largely improvised freewheeling fantasy monologues.

He topped a double bill with French and Saunders during this period.

Sessions played to his strengths in improvisation and comedy with his one-man stage show Napoleon, which ran in London's West End for some time in the mid-1980s.

He and Stephen Fry were the only two regular panellists on the original radio broadcast of Whose Line Is It Anyway? in the late 1980s.

When the show, still hosted by Clive Anderson, made the transition to television, Fry departed from regular appearances, but Sessions remained the featured panellist for the first season.

A frequent player in the second, he did not appear again after his two appearances in the third series.

A gifted impressionist who also voiced characters for Spitting Image, he drew heavily on his extensive literary education and developed a reputation for being "a bit of a swot", being able to quote extensive passages of text and make endless cultural and historical references.

His ready ability to switch between accents and personae meanwhile allowed his career in improvisation to flourish.

On Whose Line Is It Anyway?, his ability to affect the contrived witticisms of Restoration Comedy became an audience favourite.

He had a number of small parts in films including The Sender (1982), The Bounty (1984) and Castaway (1986).

In 1987 he played Lionel Zipser in Channel 4's mini-series Porterhouse Blue.

In 1989, he starred in his own one-man TV show, John Sessions.

Filmed at the Donmar Warehouse in London, the show involved Sessions performing before a live audience who were invited to nominate a person, a location and two objects from a selection, around which Sessions would improvise a surreal performance for the next half-hour.

He also appeared in several Shakespeare films, playing Macmorris in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989), Philostrate in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), and Salerio in the movie The Merchant of Venice (2004), with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons.

In a "Worst of Times" column for The Independent from around 1990, he talked of how the freezing Canadian weather had depressed him, he was smoking "far too many cigarettes" and "had a couple of disastrous flings", and described his PhD dissertation as "200 pages of rubbish".

In an interview headlined 'Who The Hell Does John Sessions Think He Is?' in Q magazine in the early 1990s, he admitted that some of his improv was not entirely spontaneous, but that if it were advertised as scripted 'it had to be funnier'.

This series prompted two further one-man TV shows: John Sessions' Tall Tales (1991) and John Sessions' Likely Stories (1994).

Although billed as improvisation, these were increasingly pre-planned.

1991 also saw Sessions in the BBC drama Jute City, a three-part thriller based around a sinister Masonic bunch of villains, co-starring with vocalist Fish (Derek W. Dick, singer in the first incarnation of rock band Marillion).

Sessions later returned to formal acting, with parts ranging from James Boswell (to Robbie Coltrane's Samuel Johnson) in the UK TV comedy drama Boswell and Johnson's Tour of the Western Isles (1993) to Doctor Prunesquallor in the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast (2000) and in 1998 as Hercules Fortesque, a BBC HR manager in the BBC mini-series In The Red adapted from the book and the BBC radio series by Mark Taverner.

In 1996, he was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts to write "Paint, said Fred", the life of Frederic, Lord Leighton, the pre-eminent Victorian artist, in a one-man show that used his comic writing abilities and his gift for impersonation.

Sessions also starred in Stella Street, a surreal "soap opera" comedy about a fantasy suburban British street inhabited by celebrities such as Michael Caine and Al Pacino, which he conceived with fellow impressionist Phil Cornwell, the two of them playing several parts in each episode.

He provided the voice of the Professor in The Adventures of Pinocchio in 1996.

On radio, Sessions was a guest in December 1997 on the regular BBC Radio 3 show Private Passions, presented by Michael Berkeley, not as himself but as a 112-year-old Viennese percussionist called Manfred Sturmer, who told anecdotes (about Brahms, Clara Schumann, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg and others) so realistically that some listeners did not realise that the whole thing was a hoax.

Other Sessions' creations appeared on Berkeley's show in subsequent years.

He also contributed "Sonnet 62" to the 2002 compilation album When Love Speaks (EMI Classics), which consists of famous actors and musicians interpreting Shakespearean sonnets and play excerpts.

In between appearing in regular film and TV roles, Sessions made appearances on Have I Got News for You and, more recently, as a semi-regular panellist on QI.

He was one of four panellists, including the permanent Alan Davies, on the inaugural episode of QI, in which he demonstrated his effortless memory of the birth and death dates of various historical figures (while simultaneously and apologetically deeming the knowledge of such facts "a sickness").