John Cleese

John Cleese is one of those rare comedians where just watching him stand in a room is already funny — the man is six foot five and moves like a malfunctioning marionette, which is basically a superpower. Cambridge-educated and impossibly posh, he turned that into the sharpest possible tool for absurdist comedy, co-founding Monty Python and unleashing Fawlty Towers on an unsuspecting world. Basil Fawlty alone would be a career-defining legacy for anyone else, but Cleese also wrote and starred in A Fish Called Wanda, picking up a BAFTA for it, and somehow kept reinventing himself decade after decade. What I genuinely admire is the intellectual ferocity behind the silliness — this guy actually thinks hard about what makes things funny. Now in his eighties and still firing off opinions on social media without a filter, he's proof that true comedic greatness doesn't mellow with age, it just gets more ornery.

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Name (English)

John Cleese

Name (Japanese)

ジョン・クリーズ

Reading

じょん・くりーず

Born

October 27, 1939 (age 86)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Scorpio / Rabbit

Origin

Weston-super-Mare, United Kingdom

Occupation

actor / television actor / film actor / comedian / voice actor

University

Clifton College

Awards & achievements

• 1987 Primetime Emmy Award
• 2016 Rose d'Or
• 1989 BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role
• 2001 European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award
• 1987 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series
• 2016 honorary doctorate

• Official sitehttps://www.johncleese.com
• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/johncleeseofficial/
• Xhttps://x.com/JohnCleese
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%20Cleese
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A7%E3%83%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%82%AF%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BA
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q25014

Tags

• actor
• television actor
• film actor

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.