Monty Python exists largely because John Cleese wanted to work with Michael Palin
The BBC offered Cleese and Graham Chapman a two-man show, but Cleese balked and phoned Palin instead. Palin, already developing a series with Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, said yes and brought all three along. Six comedians, one chance collision, and Flying Circus was born.
Palin was born in Sheffield in 1943, the son of a steel-firm engineer, and made his stage debut at five as Martha Cratchit in a school Christmas Carol. By ten he was performing Shakespeare for his mother, voicing every character himself. He read Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford, where a comedy set at a Christmas party caught the eye of fellow student Terry Jones, beginning one of British comedy's longest writing partnerships.
After graduating in 1965 the pair wrote for the BBC, including The Ken Dodd Show, and joined the large writing team on The Frost Report. That programme was the first to put all the British future Pythons in one room; Gilliam, then an American citizen, was supplying animations for the children's show Do Not Adjust Your Set, which Palin and Jones also wrote and performed.
On screen Palin swung between extremes: the manic lumberjack, the unshakeably calm shopkeeper selling a dead parrot, the bearded, tattered castaway who opened most episodes, and the shouting Gumbys. With Jones he wrote the Spanish Inquisition sketch and songs including Spam. After Python came Ripping Yarns, Time Bandits co-written with Gilliam, and a BAFTA for his supporting part in A Fish Called Wanda. He then went twenty years without a film part until he played Molotov in The Death of Stalin in 2017.
From 1980 he reinvented himself as a travel presenter for the BBC, visiting both poles, the Sahara and the Himalayas; while in Australia filming Full Circle he even did a cameo as a shark-nervous surfer on Home and Away. In 2018 he took cameras into North Korea for Channel 5. He served as president of the Royal Geographical Society from 2009 to 2012, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013 and was knighted in 2019.
Source: Michael Palin
