John Cleese was born on October 27, 1939, in Weston-Super-Mare, England. He was born into a family of modest means, his father being an insurance salesman, but he was nonetheless sent off to private schools to obtain a good education. Here he was often tormented for his height, having reached a height of six feet by the age of twelve, and eventually discovered that being humorous could deflect aggressive behavior in others. He loved humor in and of itself, collected jokes, and, like many young Britons who would grow up to be comedians, was devoted to the radio comedy show, "The Goon Show," starring the legendary Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe.

Cleese did well in both sports and academics, but his real love was comedy. He attended Cambridge to read (study) Law, but devoted a great deal of time to the university's legendary Footlights group, writing and performing in comedy reviews, often in collaboration with future fellow Python Graham Chapman. Several of these comedy reviews met with great success, including one in particular which toured under the name "Cambridge Circus." When Cleese graduated, he went on to write for the BBC, then rejoined Cambridge Circus in 1964, which toured New Zealand and America. He remained in America after leaving Cambridge Circus, performing and doing a little journalism, and here met Terry Gilliam, another future Python.

Returning to England, he began appearing in a BBC radio series, "I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again", based on Cambridge Circus. It ran for several years and also starred future 'Goodies' Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden. He also appeared, briefly, with Brooke-Taylor, Chapman & Marty Feldman in At Last the 1948 Show, for television, and a series of collaborations with some of the finest comedy-writing talent in England at the time, some of whom - Eric Idle, Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Chapman - eventually joined him in Monty Python. These programs included The Frost Report and Marty Feldman's program _"Marty" (1966)_ . Eventually, however, the writers were themselves collected to be the talent for their own program, Monty Python's Flying Circus, which was originally to be a vehicle for Cleese but soon showed itself to be an ensemble program. Monty Python displayed a strange and completely absorbing blend of low farce and high-concept absurdist humor, and remains influential to this day.

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, Life of Brian, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, and The Meaning of Life. Cleese and then-wife Connie Booth collaborated in the legendary television series Fawlty Towers, 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.

Meanwhile Cleese had established a production company, Video Arts, for clever business training videos in which he generally starred, which were and continue to be enormously successful in the English-speaking world. He continues to act prolifically in movies, including in the hit comedy A Fish Called Wanda, in the Harry Potter series, and in the James Bond series as the new Q, starting with The World Is Not Enough, in which he began as R before graduating to Q. Cleese also supplies his voice to numerous animated and video projects, and frequently does commercials.

Besides the infamous Basil Fawlty character, Cleese's other well-known trademark is his rendition of an English upper-class toff. He has a daughter with Booth and a daughter with his second wife, Barbara Trentham. He is currently married to Alice Faye Eichelberger. Education and learning are important elements of his life - he was Rector of the University of Saint Andrews from 1973 until 1976, and continues to be a professor at large of Cornell University in New York. Cleese lives in Santa Barbara, California.


Member of the comedy group "Monty Python". Holds a law degree from Cambridge University. He was a cast member of the highly successful radio show "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again". His fellow cast members were Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie, David Hatch and Jo Kendall. It was during this radio show that Cleese's famous 'Ferret Song' (later sung on the television series, "At Last the 1948 Show" (1967)) was first heard. Went to the United States with the Footlights stage show "Cambridge Circus" in 1964, and appeared on the Ed Sullivan's "Toast of the Town" (1948). Ever since one of his most famous Monty Python sketches, The Ministry of Silly Walks, he has found himself continually pestered by admirers to do silly walks for them. Rector of University of St Andrews from 1970-1973. Is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. John's father's name was Reg Cleese but his grandfather was named John Edwin Cheese. He changed his name when he joined the British army in 1915. Said he was to be the first person to say the F-word at a memorial service when he spoke at Graham Chapman's. The inspiration for "Fawlty Towers" (1975) came from a hotel stay he had with the other Pythons in the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, England. The hotel manager was called Donald Sinclair, someone Cleese considered to be the rudest man he had ever encountered. He later played a character by the name of Donald P. Sinclair in Rat Race (2001). In the late nineties he appeared in German TV commercials for a lottery service. He actually spoke German in some of these spots (while some had no dialogue and others were dubbed later on). Was the tallest member of Monty Python, having been about 2 inches taller than Graham Chapman. He allegedly refused the British Honour of the C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1996. Appeared in a series of educational short subjects produced by Video Arts [gb] designed to teach management and trainees how to handle stress and unusual situations. Cleese took advantage of his comic talents and portrayed events as absurd situations so that audiences would better remember their training. Terry Gilliam noted among his Monty Python co-stars that there seemed to be a division between the taller, more "aggressive" Cambridge men (Cleese, Graham Chapman, & Eric Idle) and the shorter, lighter-humored Oxford men (Michael Palin & Terry Jones), the latter of which the American Gilliam found himself closer to. Gilliam considered Cleese the most "Cambridge" of the group, being the tallest and most "aggressive" member of Monty Python. Has played the father of two of the Charlie's Angels. First he played Lucy Liu's father in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003). The next year he played Cameron Diaz's father in Shrek 2 (2004). Former supporter of the Liberal Democrat political party. In 2005, offered a part of his colon, removed due to diverticulitis, for sale on his official website. The proceeds are reportedly to be divided between Cleese himself and his surgeon. As a child loved the radio comedy show "The Goon Show". He and Terry Gilliam are the only members of 'Monty Python' to be nominated for Oscars. Coincidentally, they were both for Best Original Screenplay, Gilliam for Brazil (1985) and Cleese for A Fish Called Wanda (1988). Both screenplays did not win their Oscars, and both films featured Michael Palin. Just to see if anyone would notice, during the early 1970s Cleese added one obviously fake film per year to his annual filmography listing in Who's Who. For the record, these fake films were "The Bonar Law Story" (1971), "Abbott & Costello Meet Sir Michael Swann" (1972), "The Young Anthony Barber" (1973) and "Confessions of a Programme Planner" (1974). Although Cleese confessed to the gag in the 1980s, mentions of these bogus films still appear from time to time in scholarly works on Cleese, including the entry in the Encyclopedia of Television, 1st ed. (1996) edited by Horace Newcomb. Before becoming an actor, Cleese studied to be a lawyer. He went on to play a lawyer in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Splitting Heirs (1993). When he first started acting his original goal was to be a classically trained Shakespearean actor. Member of 'Monty Python' along with Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam. Helped his daughter, Camilla Cleese, to kick her drug habit (which started when she was 11) by sending her to a psychiatric ward and then a rehab clinic. After more stints in rehab, she finally kicked her drug and alcohol habit in 2007 and praised her father for helping turn her life around [December 21, 2008). During the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland, air travel across northern Europe was severely disrupted. Cleese, in Oslo on April 17 but needing to get to London by April 19, paid £3,300 for a cab ride to Brussels to catch a ferry ride.