John Cleese

Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese (1893–1972), an insurance salesman, and his wife Muriel Evelyn (née Cross, 1899–2000), the daughter of an auctioneer.

His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name Cleese when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923.

As a child, Cleese supported Bristol City and Somerset County Cricket Club.

Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School (paid for by money his mother inherited ), where he received a prize for English and did well at cricket and boxing.

When he was 13, he was awarded an exhibition at Clifton College, an English public school in Bristol.

By that age, he was more than 6 feet (1.83 m) tall.

Cleese allegedly defaced the school grounds, as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had left its plinth and gone to the toilet.

Cleese played cricket in the First XI and did well academically, passing eight O-Levels and three A-Levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry.

In his autobiography So, Anyway, he says that discovering, aged 17, he had not been made a house prefect by his housemaster affected his outlook: "It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect... I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world."

Cleese could not go straight to the University of Cambridge, as the ending of National Service meant there were twice the usual number of applicants for places, so he returned to his prep school for two years to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in Life of Brian, in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti).

He then took up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, to read law.

He also joined the Cambridge Footlights.

He recalled that he went to the Cambridge Guildhall, where each university society had a stall, and went up to the Footlights stall, where he was asked if he could sing or dance.

He replied "no" as he was not allowed to sing at his school because he was so bad, and if there was anything worse than his singing, it was his dancing.

He was then asked "Well, what do you do?"

to which he replied, "I make people laugh."

At the Footlights theatrical club, Cleese spent a lot of time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met his future writing partner Graham Chapman.

John Marwood Cleese (born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter.

Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report.

In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).

Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962.

He was also in the cast of the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take! Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with an upper second.

Despite his successes on The Frost Report, his father sent him cuttings from The Daily Telegraph offering management jobs in places such as Marks & Spencer.

Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue A Clump of Plinths.

The revue was so successful at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was renamed Cambridge Circus and taken to the West End in London and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue's sketches on The Ed Sullivan Show in October 1964.

After Cambridge Circus, Cleese briefly stayed in America, performing on and off-Broadway.

While performing in the musical Half a Sixpence, Cleese met future Python Terry Gilliam as well as American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968.

At their wedding at a Unitarian Church in Manhattan, the couple attempted to ensure an absence of any theistic language.

"The only moment of disappointment," Cleese recalled, "came at the very end of the service when I discovered that I'd failed to excise one particular mention of the word 'God.'" Later, Booth became a writing partner.

In the mid-1970s, Cleese and first wife Connie Booth cowrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, for which he won the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance.

He has also starred in Time Bandits (1981), Clockwise (1986), and Rat Race (2001) and acted in Silverado (1985), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), two James Bond films (as R and Q), two Harry Potter films (as Nearly Headless Nick), and the last three Shrek films.

He received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Cheers (1987) and was nominated for 3rd Rock from the Sun (1998) and Will & Grace (2004).

Cleese has specialised in political and religious satire, black comedy, sketch comedy, and surreal humour.

Cleese costarred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Fierce Creatures (1997), both of which he also wrote.

For A Fish Called Wanda, he received Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award nominations.

Formerly a staunch supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999, he turned down an offer from the party to nominate him for a life peerage.

In 2023, he began presenting a talk show on GB News.

In 2000, the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.

He was ranked the second best comedian ever in a 2005 Channel 4 poll of fellow comedians.

He cofounded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films as well as The Secret Policeman's Ball benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International.