John Cleese
John Cleese brought unadulterated silliness into comedy. As one of the founders of the British comedic group Monty Python's Flying Circus, John Cleese has written and performed sketch comedies that highlight the absurdity of the human condition and provide the perfect antidote through laughter. Born in Somerset, England in 1939, Cleese pursued a law degree at Cambridge University. At Cambridge, he joined the Footlights Club, writing and performing comedic revues. The extracurricular activity became a profession. The Footlights performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival among other venues, ultimately taking their show to the U.S. to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. Cleese stayed in the United States for a time, writing for television. Upon his return to the U.K. he began working for the television show The Frost Report in 1965, where he met the other writers who would become his Monty Python partners. Cleese's first screen credit was for The Magic Christian in 1968. Monty Python's Flying Circus ran from 1969-74. The Circus took traditional British humor to a new level with irreverent plots featuring repressed British men, petty government functionaries, and the old-stand-by, dysfunctional families. Monty Python's movies, with Cleese writing and acting, include And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and what some call their best film, The Life of Brian (1979). Along with his wife, Connie Booth, Cleese created the TV sitcom series Fawlty Towers (1975-79). Cleese played a compulsive and rude hotel manager who claimed he would be perfectly able to run the hotel were it not for the guests. During the 1980s, Cleese appeared in several feature length films, such as Silverado (1985) with Kevin Kline, and A Fish Called Wanda (1988), which garnered him an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay. Cleese has his own production company, Video Arts, which produces a series of business training films including such titles as "Meetings, Bloody Meetings". He has appeared in James Bond movies and provided voices for animated films such as Shrek 2 and 3 and Charlotte's Web (2006). In a more scholarly vein, John Cleese was a professor-at-large at Cornell University until 2006, and has subsequently been reappointed as a Provost's Visiting Professor until 2009.
