John Marwood Cleese (born October 27, 1939) is an English comedian and actor best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for co-writing the TV series Fawlty Towers in which he played Basil Fawlty.

Biography

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John Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England to Reginald Francis Cleese and Muriel Cross. His family's surname was previously "Cheese", but his father, an insurance salesman, changed his surname to "Cleese" upon joining the army in 1915 Cleese John Cleese's father

As a boy, Cleese was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, from which he was expelled for a humorous defacing of school grounds: he used painted footsteps to suggest that the school's statue of Field Marshal Earl Douglas Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet. His talent for comedy progressed with his membership of the Cambridge Footlights Revue while he was studying for a law degree at Downing College at the University of Cambridge. Here he met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. As Cleese's comic reputation flourished, he was soon offered a position as a writer with BBC Radio, working on, among others, sketches for The Dick Emery Show. The success of the Footlights Revue led to the recording of a short series of half-hour radio programmes, called I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again (which was so popular that the BBC commissioned a regular series with the same title). He then joined the Cambridge Revue, Cambridge Circus, for a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, and decided to stay on in America performing on and off-Broadway, including in the musical Half a Sixpence. It was during this time he met future Python Terry Gilliam and his future wife, American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on February 20 1968. After his return to England, he started performing as a cast member of the highly successful BBC Radio show I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, which ran from 1965 to 1974. His fellow cast members were Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie, David Hatch and Jo Kendall.

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