He was born on October 27, 1939, in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, to a family of modest means. His father, Reg Cheese, was an insurance salesman, yet still managed to send his son to private schools for a good education. His mother, Muriel Cheese, lived to be 101 years old and died on her birthday.
Cleese went to Clifton College in Bristol, but was expelled for defacing the school grounds. He painted footsteps from the school’s statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig to suggest that he had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet.
He later went on to study law at Downing College and Cambridge University where he joined the amateur theatrical group, Cambridge Footlights Revue. Here Cleese met his future writing partner and future fellow Python, Graham Chapman.
When Cleese graduated with his law degree from Cambridge, he went on to write sketches for BBC radio.
In 1964 he joined the Cambridge Revue, Cambridge Circus, which toured on and off Broadway. It was during this time that he met another future Python, Terry Gilliam. He also met his future wife, actress Connie Booth, whom he married on February 20, 1968.
Cleese returned to and landed a role as the cast of the BBC Radio show, I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again. The show ran from 1965 to 1974 and was highly successful.
In 1969 he along with writers Eric Idle, Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and Chapman created their own program, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The show was known for its impossible or highly improbable events, innuendo-laden humor, sight gags, and sketches without punch lines. The show ran for four seasons from October 1969 to December 1974 on BBC, of which Cleese appeared in only three. He received a minor writing credit for the fourth series.
From 1970 to 1973, Cleese served as rector of the University of St. Andrews. In 1971, he and wife Connie Booth had their first and only child, daughter Cynthia Cleese. In 1978, Cleese won the TV Times award for Funniest Man on TV. The same year he divorced Connie, and appeared as a guest star on Jim Henson’sThe Muppet Show, where he ended up strangling Kermit the Frog.
After Monty Python Cleese went on to play the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty in the British comedy Fawlty Towers, which he co-wrote with Connie Booth. Prunella Scales played fawlty’s wife and Andrew Sachs played the dim-witted waiter Manuel. The series was instantly popular, won three BAFTA awards, and is still considered to be one of the finest examples of British comedy.
In 1988, Cleese wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda, alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline. Two years later he divorced his second wife of nine years, Barbara Trentham, and married his third and current wife, Alice Faye Eichelberger, in 1992.
For political reasons, Cleese declined the British honor of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1996. Three years later, in 1999, he appeared in the James Bond movie, The World is Not Enough, as Q’s assistant, alongside Pierce Brosnan and Denise Richards. He played the same character in 2002’s Die Another Day, this time with Bond girl Halle Berry.
In 2006 he performed at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, Quebec, where he performed sketches reminiscent of his Monty Python days. The gala ended with Cleese’s pretend execution by guillotine just before he was about to say something to the crowd.
YUDDY
