John Cleese

John Marwood Cleese (/ˈkliːz/ KLEEZ; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer, and presenter. Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, he first achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report. In the late 1960s, he cofounded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. Along with his Python costars Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, Cleese starred in the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983).

Cleese and his first wife Connie Booth cowrote the sitcom Fawlty Towers (1975—79), in which he starred as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, which earned him the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance. In 2000, the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, and in a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on its list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.