DID YOU KNOW? John Cleese

The Monty Python co-founder, 78, is back on our screens in the autumnal romantic comedy Hold The Sunset (7.30pm, BBC1). Here are some things you might not know about him…

He was born John Marwood Cleese on October 27, 1939, in Weston-super-Mare. The family name was originally Cheese, but John’s father thought it was embarrassing, and changed it when he enlisted during the First World War.

While at Cambridge University, John was a member of the famous Footlights theatrical club, where he spent a lot of time with future Goodies Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie – and met his future writing partner and fellow Python, Graham Chapman.

The first writing session of the Monty Python team was on May 11, 1969. Among the names suggested for the show were Owl Stretching Time and Arthur Megapode’s Flying Circus. He based his most famous creation, Fawlty Towers proprietor Basil Fawlty, on a real person, hotelier Donald Sinclair, whom he had met in 1970 while the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay. He has been married four times. His first wife was his Fawlty Towers co-star Connie Booth, whom he married in 1968. Since 2012, he has been married to jewellery designer Jennifer Wade, who is 32 years his junior. He has two children. After starring in the 1997 zoo-set comedy Fierce Creatures, Cleese developed a passion for lemurs, and has done much to highlight the plight of the animal. He even has a species named after him, the Avahi cleesei.