by David Michael Brown
Between 1969 and 1974, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was conceived, written and performed by Cleese along with Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Monty Python changed the face of comedy. Defiantly anti-establishment and sticking it to the man at every opportunity, the irreverent show was a boundary-pushing zany comic concoction. Fuelled by Gilliam’s iconic animation and a conveyor belt of quotable catchphrases, “nudge nudge, wink wink!”, the non-stop barrage of surreal sketches, including “The Ministry of Silly Walks”, “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” and the infamous “The Parrot Sketch”, still resonate today, inspiring generations of funny people.
Inevitably, the big screen beckoned, and the high-stepping Cleese and his fellow comedians poked fun at the Arthurian legend in Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975) with hilarious results. The controversial but brilliant Life of Brian (1979) followed and saw the Pythons dealing with accusations of blasphemy. The story of Brian, the child born in the stable next door to Jesus on the same night, was deemed sacrilegious by some and uproariously witty by many. Finally, The Meaning of Life (1983) returned the Pythons to more sketch-based comedy, albeit in a more adult fashion. Freed of the shackles of television, the Pythons gleefully pushed limits.
In the mid-1970s, Cleese and first wife Connie Booth co-wrote, arguably, the greatest British sitcom of all time, the BAFTA-winning Fawlty Towers. Set in a ramshackle hotel in the British seaside town of Torquay, Cleese, at his maniacal best, played the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty. With Prunella Scales as his domineering wife Sybil and Andrew Sachs as their never-comprehending subservient Spanish waiter Manuel, the show, which only lasted for 12 episodes, is an all-time classic topping the British Film Institute’s 2000 list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.
On the big screen, Hollywood beckoned. Cleese starred in fellow Python Terry Gilliam’s fantasy adventure Time Bandits (1981) as a camp Robin Hood and in Silverado (1985) he rode out to the Wild West. In Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), he played Baron Frankenstein’s tutor and brain donor Professor Waldman and in Rat Race (2001) as an eccentric Las Vegas billionaire. He also appeared in two James Bond films, The World is Not Enough (2000) and Die Another Day (2002), playing ‘R’ and ‘Q’ respectively. And the young-at-heart will recognise him as Nearly Headless Nick in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and the King in the last three Shrek films.
In 1988, in a huge surprise, Cleese played the romantic leading man in the brilliant A Fish Called Wanda co-starring an Oscar-winning Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and former Python colleague Michael Palin. A comedy crime caper paying tribute to the madcap Ealing comedies of the ‘50s, the hilarious heist film follows hapless barrister Archie Leach, played by Cleese, who is seduced into helping a gang of diamond thieves. Curtis lights up the screen and the chemistry between her and Cleese is palpable. In one famous scene, it is a besotted Cleese who flashes the flesh turning the tables on traditional cinematic expectations.
“I had an idea early on, when I was talking to Jamie about the plot and the way I was going to develop it,” he told Vanity Fair, “and I had a scene where she was caught naked. She said, ‘You know, I’ve done several of these. I’d rather not.’ She said, ‘Why don’t you write a scene where you’re the one who’s naked?’ I thought, That’s really good.”
In the delightful family flick, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Cleese plays the benevolent proprietor of Bridwell’s Animal Rescue Tent, the pop-up shelter where lonely schoolgirl Emily (Darby Camp) and her inept Uncle Casey (British comic Jack Whitehall) first meet Clifford, a then small red dog. Cleese lends the character a mischievous sense of magic, that sense of whimsy that provokes wide-eyed wonder in the younglings.
Arrested Development and Veep star Tony Hale who plays the villainous Zac Tieran, the owner of Lyfegro, a genetics company that wants the now huge Clifford’s DNA to help his animal-growing experiments was in awe of his co-star as he told entertainment website Coming Soon. “It was really hard not to fanboy because I grew up on Monty Python and even though there was a broad comedy, they had such subtlety in their performances many times. So I remember we were going to the van for the scene, and my scene was being shot somewhere else than his, but I was just kind of in the backseat just staring at him and I’m sure he was like, ‘All right man, settle down.’ But I was just like, ‘that’s John Cleese. That’s John Cleese.’ I mean, I was just trying to not make a complete fool of myself.”
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