John Cleese's family name was Cheese until his father changed it
The man who wrote a famous sketch set in a cheese shop was nearly born John Cheese. His father found the family surname embarrassing, signed up for the First World War as Cleese, and made it official in 1923. Sixteen years later, in Weston-super-Mare, the future Basil Fawlty arrived as the couple's only child.
Cleese was already over six feet tall at 13, when he won a place at Clifton College in Bristol. He passed A-levels in maths, physics and chemistry and, according to one story, painted footprints suggesting a statue of Earl Haig had stepped down to visit the lavatory. Being passed over as house prefect at 17 struck him as unfair, and he later wrote that it changed how he saw the world. Because the end of National Service doubled university applications, he spent two years teaching at his old prep school, and his Latin lessons later fed the graffiti scene in Life of Brian.
At Cambridge he read law and joined the Footlights, telling the recruiters he could neither sing nor dance but could make people laugh. There he met Graham Chapman, his future writing partner. Their 1963 revue went from Edinburgh to the West End, New Zealand and Broadway. While in New York he married actress Connie Booth in 1968 and met Terry Gilliam.
His television breakthrough came on The Frost Report in 1966, as the tall upper-class figure looking down on Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett in the Class sketch. When the BBC offered him and Chapman a series in 1969, Chapman's drinking made Cleese wary of a two-man show, so he recruited Michael Palin, who brought along Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Gilliam. Monty Python's Flying Circus followed, though Cleese left after its third series.
With Booth he wrote Fawlty Towers, which earned him a BAFTA in 1980 and topped a British Film Institute list of the best British television in 2000. His script for A Fish Called Wanda brought an Oscar nomination. He also co-founded Video Arts, making humorous training films, and in 1999 declined a Liberal Democrat offer of a life peerage.
Source: John Cleese
