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Graham Chapman |
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Graham Chapman, 19
is the youngest member of the group. A modest, soft-spoken loud
mouth, Graham feels that without him the show would have been a
complete disaster. A brilliant and prolific writer, Graham wrote many
of the I.T.M.A. Shows as well as most of E.M.Forster. Graham's
favourite colour is off-white and his favourite heavy gas is Helium.
Most often seen with a pipe in his mouth, Graham is said to have
liked nothing better than a rough shag after filming. |
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 Born
in Leicester, England on January 8, 1941, Chapman was originally a
medical student, but changed to theatre when he joined Footlights at
Cambridge. Chapman was perhaps best remembered for taking on the lead
roles in The Holy Grail, as King Arthur, and Life of Brian, as Brian Cohen.
The
movie roles were fairly straight, the comedy deriving from the
stereotypical lead in bizarre situations, encountering eccentric
characters, still being played as serious, and unflinching. These
roles, however, were unusual for the Graham Chapman the public had
come to know on the Flying Circus, where he figured as the tall,
craggy pipe smoker who gave the impression of calmness, disguising a
manic unpredictability as real in his characters as they were in
reality. For behind the pipe-smoking, rugby-playing exterior lay an
alcoholic with whom the rest of the Pythons often had trouble
dealing. This was one of the reasons that Cleese left the television
show after series three.
 Chapman
particularly had trouble filming Holy Grail in Scotland, where he
got a case of delirium tremens, often called DTs. During his worst
alcoholism, he was reportedly consuming two quarts of gin every day.
However, by the time his definitive role of Brian arose, he was sober
and continued to produce some of his best work with the Pythons.
Besides
starring in Monty Python features, Chapman starred in movies such as
The Odd Job (he was also the producer) and Yellowbeard (which he also
directed), also making several appearances on Saturday Night Live.
Chapman died of spinal and throat cancer on October 4, 1989. Thanks
to the nature of the other Pythons, he is now lovingly referred to as
"the dead one." Cleese also made a point to be the first
person to say 'fuck' in a British eulogy, but only because the
deceased (Chapman) was the first person to say 'shit' on British television.
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Terry Gilliam |
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Terry Gilliam, 10
1/2 is the real baby of the group. He is so young and talented that
it is almost presumption to mention his name along with the others.
"I think I can safely say that without me there would have been
no Monty Python, no United Nations and quite possibly no end to the
Second World War," says Terry disarmingly. Terry has written
over 40 symphonies and his greatest likes are his own cartoons and
having his inside leg measured. |
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 Gilliam,
born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 22, 1940, is the only
non-British member of the troupe. He started off as an animator and
strip cartoonist for Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine, one issue of
which featured Cleese. Moving from the USA to England, he animated
features for Do Not Adjust Your Set and then joined Monty Python's
Flying Circus when it was created.
He was the
principal artist-animator of the distinctive, surreal cartoons, which
frequently linked the show's sketches together, and defined the
group's visual language in other mediums. He mixed his own art,
characterised by soft gradients and odd bulbous shapes, with
backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from
the Victorian era. The style has been mimicked repeatedly throughout
the years: in the children's television cartoon Angela Anaconda, a
series of television commercials for Guinness, the JibJab cartoons
featured on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the online comic strip
The New Adventures Of Queen Victoria, and the television history
series Terry Jones' Medieval Lives. The title sequence for Desperate
Housewives and the visits to the land of the living in Grim Fandango
are also highly Gilliamesque. The style of animation used for South
Park was inspired by Gilliam's paper cut-out cartoons for Monty
Python's Flying Circus.
Besides doing the
animations for the Flying Circus, he also appeared in several
sketches, usually playing parts that no one else wanted to play
(generally because they required a lot of make-up or uncomfortable
costumes, such as a recurring knight in armour who would end sketches
by walking on and hitting one  of
the other characters over the head with a plucked chicken) and
played side parts in the films.
He co-directed
Monty Python and The Holy Grail and directed short segments of other
Python films (for instance "The Crimson Permanent
Assurance", the short film that appears before The Meaning of
Life). Gilliam has gone on to become a celebrated and imaginative
film director of such notable titles as Time Bandits, Brazil, The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Brothers Grimm and Tideland.
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John Cleese |
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John Cleese, 18 is
even younger than Graham, the youngest of the group. John refers to
himself as a comic genius, a manic wild-eyed wizard of wit, and one
of the most popular men since Ghandhi. His special role in Python, he
feels, has been the complete integration of writing and performing
into a viable and successful whole. John's favourite colour is fish,
and his pet hate is insincerity. |
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 Born
on October 27, 1939 in Weston-super-Mare, England, Cleese’s
surname had originally been Cheese. His father, however, had the name
changed to Cleese when he joined the army during World War II.
Perhaps the best known of the Pythons, Cleese attended Clifton
College, Bristol where he developed a taste for performing by
appearing in the house plays. He moved on to Cambridge, where he met
his future Python writing partner, Chapman.
His work with
Chapman was, aside from Gilliam's animations, perhaps the most
surreal of the Pythons' work and almost certainly the most
intentionally satirical. Unlike Palin and Jones, Cleese and Chapman
actually wrote together, in the same room. Cleese claims that their
writing partnership involved him sitting with pen and paper, and
Chapman sitting back, not speaking for lengths at a time, but when he
did speak, it was often brilliant. Without Chapman's input, the
"dead parrot" sketch would have been about the duller
subject of a car (it is much harder to imagine Cleese throwing about
a car in the same way he threw about the parrot). |
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Monty
Python - Ministry Of Silly Walks T-Shirt
Buy
at AllPosters.com
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Their work often
involved ordinary people in ordinary situations, doing incredibly
strange and surreal things. For example, Cleese and Chapman
transformed the ordinary sight "a civil servant in black suit
and bowler hat makes his way to work" into a bizarrely
unforgettable scene; the straight-faced Cleese used his physical
potential to its full force as the crane-legged civil servant
performing an athletic, grotesque, utterly unique walk to his office
at the "Ministry of Silly Walks".
This sketch was in
fact written by Palin and Jones, but Cleese made it his own,
showcasing his talent for physical comedy (also famously used in
Fawlty Towers) and playing characters who could remain serious, even
impassive, while doing something utterly ludicrous. His role as Sir
Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail also showcases this, as
he fights his way through a castle to save a damsel in distress, much
like, say, Kevin Costner in films such as Robin Hood: Prince of
Thieves, although completely oblivious to the fact that he is
actually savaging wedding guests.
Another popular
device used by the two was highly articulate arguments over
completely arbitrary subjects, such as in the "cheese shop",
the "dead parrot" sketch or the "argument
clinic". All of these roles were opposite Palin, who Cleese
often claims is his favourite Python to work with.
 Fawlty
Towers was a British sitcom created by Cleese and first broadcast on
BBC2 in 1975. Only twelve episodes were produced, but the series has
had a lasting and powerful influence on later shows. The show is set
in a fictional hotel named Fawlty Towers in the Devon town of Torquay
on "The English Riviera". The series was written by Cleese
and (then wife) Connie Booth, who also played two of the main
characters, and was broadcast in two series: The first, in 1975, and
the second, in 1979.
Fawlty Towers was
inspired by the Monty Python team's stay in the Gleneagles Hotel in
Torquay. Cleese and Booth stayed on at the hotel after filming for
the Python show had finished. The owner, Mr. Donald Sinclair, was
very rude, throwing a bus timetable at a guest who asked when the
next bus to town would arrive and placing Eric Idle's suitcase behind
a wall in the garden in case it contained a bomb (actually it
contained a ticking alarm clock). He also criticised the
American-born Terry Gilliam's table manners for being too American
(he had the fork in the wrong hand while eating), possibly inspiring
Basil's treatment of an American visitor in the episode "Waldorf
Salad". Sinclair died in England in 1981 — despite rumours
that he had emigrated to Canada, he never left Torquay.
Interestingly, Basil Fawlty displayed an affinity for Canada on a
couple of occasions in the series, once joking that he would move
there to escape his wife. Mr. Sinclair and some of his relatives have
not appreciated the way he has been portrayed, although former staff
and visitors have remembered actual events there that were allegedly
as ludicrous as those depicted in the programmes. Also, the two
daughters of Donald Sinclair confirm that it is an accurate rendition
of their father. In fact, his eldest daughter Beatrice  (Ann)
left England for the United States at age 17 to escape her
controlling parents, who had pulled her out of schooling at age 12 in
order to work full-time at the hotel.
In 1988 Cleese
wrote and starred in A Fish Named Wanda with fellow Python Michael
Palin. The movie was a major critical and commercial success when it
was released and has remained a popular favourite since. Kline
received wide acclaim and won an  Academy
Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work. The principal cast
reunited in 1997 playing different roles for Fierce Creatures.
Cleese played Q's
assistant ("R") and finally the new Q himself in the James
Bond movies. He also has done work for Shrek 2, and appeared in the
first two Harry Potter movies, Rat Race, and several Saturday Night
Live episodes. Cleese has recently had a species of lemur named after
him, Avahi cleesei (or "Cleese's Woolly Lemur"). This was
in recognition of his promotion of conservation issues after the
release of his film Fierce Creatures, which featured such an animal,
and Operation Lemur with John Cleese, which highlighted their plight
on the island of Madagascar — their natural habitat.
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