October 21, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

British actor and co-founder of Monty Python, John Cleese, is 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, October 21, Graphic News:  When John Cleese arrived at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1960, it was to study law. He later played a lawyer in A Fish Called Wanda, the 1988 hit film for which his screenplay was Oscar-nominated. And it's possible he wishes he had stuck with the legal profession after a settlement, negotiated this summer by divorce barrister Fiona Shackleton -- whose previous clients include Prince Charles and Sir Paul McCartney -- left his third ex-wife, American analyst Alyce Faye Eichelberger, the wealthier of the pair, with £12.5 million in cash and property assets, plus an annual income of £600,000 for the next seven years. If he had been contemplating retirement as he approached his seventies, Cleese declared it was no longer an option. He would have to work on, he said, "to feed the beast." Summoning the kind of acid remark worthy of his alter ego, Basil Fawlty, he added: "I got off lightly. Think what I'd have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship."
 
Cleese's blog currently features a Birthday Suicide Poll, inviting fans to choose the way in which one of Britain's most enduring funny men might "end it all." These include watching fellow-Python Michael Palin's travel videos back-to-back and committing hara-kiri with a grapefruit knife. It is just this kind of humour, eschewing any conventional idea of good taste, that has defined Cleese's hugely successful career. Its roots can be traced to a childhood love of The Goon Show, the radio classic starring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe and the need to develop a strategy for coping with ceaseless schoolboy taunts. By the time he was 13, Cleese, the privately-educated son of an insurance salesman from the English seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare, was already over six feet tall. Being humorous, he discovered, kept the bullies at bay. 
 
At Cambridge he met medical student Graham Chapman, and other members of the now-celebrated Footlights undergraduate theatre group. Together they wrote sketches and reviews of such quality that one particular show -- Cambridge Circus -- went on tour. Abandoning the idea of a legal career, Cleese began writing for the BBC and, in the tradition of his Goons heroes, appeared in the long-running radio series, "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again." Cleese worked with the finest comic writers of the time, including The Goodies trio -- Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie -- and Marty Feldman. Terry Gilliam, whom Cleese had met in America in 1964, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin eventually joined Cleese and Chapman to produce the highly original Monty Python's Flying Circus for BBC television, in 1969. Characterised by absurdist humour, the show attracted dedicated followers and spawned a number of movies, including the controversial Life of Brian (1979), a spoof about a messiah figure, which upset some religious groups.
 
A stay at a badly-run Torquay hotel inspired Cleese and his first wife, Connie Booth, to create what is now regarded as the benchmark for British TV comedy, Fawlty Towers. First aired in September 1975, the couple spent six weeks writing each episode, sustained by their earnings from commercials. The resulting quality of every one of the 12 shows has meant that, even this month (October 2009), the BBC continues to generate sales from a new DVD re-release. Cleese's portrayal of manic hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty is recognised around the world.
 
Divorce from Booth led Cleese into therapy. He has since written two successful self-help books on family relationships. The father of two daughters -- one by Booth and one by second wife Barbara Trentham -- he describes his relationship with his own mother, who died in 2000 on her 101st birthday, as "very,very difficult."
/ENDS