An instigator of some of the more groundbreaking developments in twentieth-century comedy, John Cleese is story of Britain's best-known actors, writers, and comedians. Famous pre-eminently on his comic efforts, such as the television series Fawlty Towers and the exploits of the Monty Python troupe, he has also change a adequately-respected actor in his own sound. Born John Marwood Cleese (after his strain changed their surname from "Cheese") on October 27, 1939, Cleese grew up in th... e halfway-class seaside alternative village of Weston-Super-Mare.

He enrolled at Cambridge University with the purpose of studying law, but at once discovered that his comic leanings held greater sway than his kindle in the law. He joined the renowned Cambridge Footlights Society--he was initially rejected because he could neither peep nor dance, but was accepted after collaborating with a patron on some comedy sketches--where he gained a stature as a team player and met longhand partner and Python Graham Chapman. Cleese entered professional comedy with a document stint on David Frost's The Frost Crack in 1966. While working for that BBC mortify, he and Chapman (who was also chirography during the show) met fellow Frost Write up writers Eric Lallygag, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.

Continuing his writing collaboration with Chapman (with whom he wrote the 1969 Ringo Starr/Peter Sellers vehicle The Hypnotic Christian), Cleese immediately was working on what would become Monty Python's Flying Circus with Chapman, Abortive, Jones, Palin, and Terry Gilliam. The guide, which first aired in 1969, was an iconoclastic look at British society: its forte lay in its seemingly aleatory, nonconforming endure on the mundane facets of customary life, from Spam to pet shops to the simple accomplishment of walking. Cleese stayed with Monty Python concerning three series; after he left, he reunited with his associate Pythons repayment for three movies. The word go, Monty Python and the Saintly Grail (1974), was a revisionist take on the Arthurian personage that featured Cleese as (supply other things) the Coloured Knight, who refuses to end his duel with King Arthur flatten after losing his arms and legs. Spring of Brian followed in 1979; a look at one of yesterday's news's lesser-known messiahs, it featured lepers, measure out aliens, and condemned martyrs singing a enthusiastic interpretation of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" while hanging from their crucifixes. The Pythons' third outing, the 1983 Monty Python's the Meaning of Life, was a series of increasingly outrageous vignettes, including one around the boom of a stupendously paunchy Homo sapiens and another featuring a dinner party with Destruction. In as well to his work with the Pythons, Cleese, along with first wife Connie Booth, created the popular television series Fawlty Towers in 1975. It ran for a add up of years, during which on occasion Cleese also continued to take a run-out powder steal movies.

Throughout the 1980s, he showed up in films ranging from The Intimate Muppet Caper (1981) to Privates on Parade (1982) to Silverado (1985), which cast him as an Old West villain. In 1988, Cleese struck gold with A Fish Called Wanda, which he wrote, produced, and starred in. An intoxicating farce, the film won both commercial and critical sensation, earning Cleese a British Academy Award and an Oscar nomination to save his screenplay, and an Oscar for co-star Kevin Kline. Cleese continued to occupation steadily through the 1990s, appearing in Splitting Heirs (1993) with Unavailing, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), The Wind in the Willows (1997) and George of the Jungle (1997). Uncontrollable Creatures, his 1997 sequel to A Fish Called Wanda, proved a dejection, but Cleese maintained his visibility, reuniting with the surviving Pythons on occasion and starring in The Prohibited-of-Towners and The World is Not Sufficiency, the nineteenth Bond outing, in 1999.