Trivia: While attending Cambridge University, Leicester-born Graham Chapman met and befriended fellow student John Cleese. Sharing a keen sense of the ridiculous, Chapman and Cleese formed a writing/performing team, contributing scripts to a variety of BBC radio and TV shows, most notably Doctor in the House. They also wrote for such satirical films as The Magic Christian (1969) and Rentadick (1972). In 1969, Chapman and Cleese formed the Monty Python comedy troupe, which led to the matchless TV comedy-sketch series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974). Because he came closest to resembling a film star, the Pythons cast Chapman in the leading roles of their film projects Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and The Life of Brian (1978); in the latter film, Chapman scored as an "alternate Messiah" who ended his life on the Cross while singing an insipid cheer-up song. On his own, Graham Chapman was not quite as successful as he'd been in the company of fellow Pythons Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilian, though he did publish a moderately successful 1981 memoir, A Liar's Autobiography. After co-scripting and co-starring in the all-star "comedy salad" Yellowbeard (1983), Graham Chapman died of spinal and throat cancer; he was only 48.

Trivia: An instigator of some of the more groundbreaking developments in twentieth-century comedy, John Cleese is one of Britain's best-known actors, writers, and comedians. Famous primarily for his comic efforts, such as the television series Fawlty Towers and the exploits of the Monty Python troupe, he has also become a well-respected actor in his own right.Born John Marwood Cleese (after his family changed their surname from "Cheese") on October 27, 1939, Cleese grew up in the middle-class seaside resort town of Weston-Super-Mare. He enrolled at Cambridge University with the intention of studying law, but soon discovered that his comic leanings held greater sway than his interest in the law. He joined the celebrated Cambridge Footlights Society--he was initially rejected because he could neither sing nor dance, but was accepted after collaborating with a friend on some comedy sketches--where he gained a reputation as a team player and met future writing partner and Python Graham Chapman.Cleese entered professional comedy with a writing stint on David Frost's The Frost Report in 1966. While working for that BBC show, he and Chapman (who was also writing for the show) met fellow Frost Report writers Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Continuing his writing collaboration with Chapman (with whom he wrote the 1969 Ringo Starr/Peter Sellers vehicle The Magic Christian), Cleese soon was working on what would become Monty Python's Flying Circus with Chapman, Idle, Jones, Palin, and Terry Gilliam. The show, which first aired in 1969, was an iconoclastic look at British society: its genius lay in its seemingly random, bizarre take on the mundane facets of everyday life, from Spam to pet shops to the simple act of walking. Cleese stayed with Monty Python for three series; after he left, he reunited with his fellow Pythons for three movies. The first, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), was a revisionist take on the Arthurian legend that featured Cleese as (among other things) the Black Knight, who refuses to end his duel with King Arthur even after losing his arms and legs. Life of Brian followed in 1979; a look at one of history's lesser-known messiahs, it featured lepers, space aliens, and condemned martyrs singing a rousing version of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" while hanging from their crucifixes. The Pythons' third outing, the 1983 Monty Python's the Meaning of Life, was a series of increasingly outrageous vignettes, including one about the explosion of a stupendously obese man and another featuring a dinner party with Death.In addition to his work with the Pythons, Cleese, along with first wife Connie Booth, created the popular television series Fawlty Towers in 1975. It ran for a number of years, during which time Cleese also continued to make movies. Throughout the 1980s, he showed up in films ranging from The Great Muppet Caper (1981) to Privates on Parade (1982) to Silverado (1985), which cast him as an Old West villain. In 1988, Cleese struck gold with A Fish Called Wanda, which he wrote, produced, and starred in. An intoxicating farce, the film won both commercial and critical success, earning Cleese a British Academy Award and an Oscar nomination for his screenplay, and an Oscar for co-star Kevin Kline. Cleese continued to work steadily through the 1990s, appearing in Splitting Heirs (1993) with Idle, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), The Wind in the Willows (1997) and George of the Jungle (1997). Fierce Creatures, his 1997 sequel to A Fish Called Wanda, proved a disappointment, but Cleese maintained his visibility, reuniting with the surviving Pythons on occasion and starring in The Out-of-Towners and The World is Not Enough, the nineteenth Bond outing, in 1999.As the new century got underway, Cleese wrote and hosted a documentary series about the human face, and he took a small but recurring role in the Harry Potter film series. In 2002 he appeared in the infamous Eddie Murphy turkey The Adventures of Pluto Nash, and showed up in another Bond film. In 2007 he was cast to voice the role of Fiona's father in Shrek 2, leading to a series of appearances for him in other animated films such as Igor, Planet 51, and Winnie the Pooh. He also appeared opposite Steve Martin in 2009's The Pink Panther 2.

Trivia: For most of Terry Gilliam's early career, fans of the popular comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus assumed that he was British, since Python's other five members were natives of Britain. But the innovative animator and future director, who spent more time behind the scenes than in front of the camera, was actually the troupe's only American member. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 22, 1940, Gilliam was briefly employed as an assistant editor for Help! magazine (a job that introduced him to English comedian John Cleese, who was in NYC posing for a comic photo-strip in the magazine); he then emigrated to England in 1967. Soon after gilliam arrived in the U.K., he began working on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a popular children's TV show, developing his eccentric animated cartoons, which put into motion a hodgepodge of images, including photographs, cutouts from magazines, and famous works of art. Gilliam's contributions to the show were geared more toward adults, as his surrealistic stream-of-consciousness segments, drenched in black humor, were beyond the grasp of most children.In 1969, Gilliam was asked by Cleese and others to join the absurdist comedy troupe Monty Python. In addition to writing for Monty Python's Flying Circus, Gilliam also contributed his animated interludes, for which he was pretty much left to his own devices; the other Pythons just told him how much time he needed to fill and never gave him any narrative direction. Gilliam began offering his iconoclastic vision to moviegoers with the comedy troupe's first original film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), which he co-directed with fellow Python Terry Jones. An instant cult classic, the movie contained all the requisite Python elements: absurdist humor, self-referential parody, and extremely quotable dialogue. The following year, Gilliam had his first outing as a solo director with Jabberwocky (1976). Based on the poem by Lewis Carroll, the film featured a medieval setting similar to that of Holy Grail and starred Pythonite Michael Palin. Along with Python's brand of irreverent humor, the film featured glimmers of the visual resplendence that would become the director's trademark. But critics found it awkward and repetitive, and audiences largely stayed away. Following Jabberwocky's relative failure, Gilliam regrouped with his fellow Pythonites, co-creating The Life of Brian, the tale of a man with the misfortune of being confused with Jesus Christ. He left the directing duties to Terry Jones, focusing on animation, screenwriting, and acting. Gilliam returned to directing with Time Bandits (1979), a surreal journey through history led by a small boy and several dwarves. Bearing many similarities to Jabberwocky, Time Bandits relied less on repetition and moved the audience more briskly from one scene to the next. It did well at the box office and put Gilliam in the ranks of directors to watch.After co-directing with Terry Jones the third and final Python film, Monty Python's the Meaning of Life (1983), Gilliam made what many people consider his masterpiece, the dystopian satire Brazil (1985). Instead of journeying back to the Middle Ages, Gilliam boldly predicted a retro-1930s future of anonymous office drones commanded by an all-powerful computer. Blindingly imaginative, the film starred Jonathan Pryce as Sam Lowery, who attempts to escape the stifling bureaucratic system by fantasizing about being a superhero, and later by actually battling the powers-that-be in his own cowardly fashion. Consistently blurring the line between fantasy and reality and uncompromising in its surreal eccentricity, Gilliam's masterwork has been called Orwellian, Kafkaesque, and Luddite. A failure at the box office, Brazil has made up for that disappointment with its cult status. In addition to critical praise and a Los Angeles Film Critics award for Best Film, Gilliam received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.It was four years before Gilliam stepped behind the camera again, for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989). Returning to historical fantasy, Gilliam tells the unlikely tales of the title character as though they really happened. The Baron explores the inside of a volcano, takes a hot air balloon to the moon, gets swallowed by a whale, and quells a war that he himself started. Munchausen's stories were less well known to most Americans than to audiences in Britain, where the film won British Academy Awards for Best Production Design, Best Makeup, and Best Costume Design.Gilliam followed Munchausen with his most accessible work to date, 1991's The Fisher King. Foregoing much of his usual ornate visual style, the director focused on characters rather than flashy spectacle; the relationships among a depressed former DJ (Jeff Bridges), his enabling girlfriend (Mercedes Ruehl, in an Oscar-winning performance), and a homeless man (Robin Williams) who saves him from suicide are intertwined in a riveting, funny, and ultimately heart-warming way. Gilliam balances humor, pathos, and story-telling, while avoiding mawkishness. He received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director, and the movie won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival.Gilliam returned to the director's chair in 1995, achieving his biggest box office hit with the science fiction epic 12 Monkeys. Starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt (in an Oscar-nominated performance), the movie tells the story of a prisoner from the future sent back in time to save the world from a catastrophic virus. But the scientists of 2035 haven't quite mastered the art of time travel, and they accidentally send Bruce Willis' character back to 1990 instead of 1996. The film was a critical and commercial success despite its hard-to-follow plot, allowing Gilliam the freedom to take even more creative risks. His next project, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 novel, was the ultimate "trip" movie. Detailing Thompson's drug-addled journey to the gambling capital of the world, it starred Johnny Depp as the author's alter ego, Raoul Duke. The movie was the perfect vehicle for Gilliam to create an alternate universe fueled by the mind-bending substances in which the lead characters freely and plentifully indulge. With melting faces, a lounge full of human-sized lizards, bats flying in the desert, and a demon with breasts on its back, the movie didn't need and didn't really have a plot. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was the definition of a love-it-or-hate-it movie.In 2000, the director began working on Good Omens, a comedy/fantasy based on the book Good Omens: or, The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, a humorous story about the apocalypse. That endeavor fell by the wayside, however, when Gilliam attempted to film his lifelong dream project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in late 2000. From injured actors to faulty props to inclement weather conditions, the $30 million shoot became a textbook example of Murphy's Law, and was shut down despite pleas from the haggard director. In 2003, however, the project found new, unexpected life in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary Lost in La Mancha, a comic tale of cinematic defeat. Intended as a "making-of" featurette to be included on the finished film's DVD, the documentary chronicled the morose fate of Gilliam's botched production in all of its painful, hilariously unbelievable glory, and became a minor art-house attraction. Gilliam subsequently fought to buy back the rights to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in light of all the renewed interest, but it remained to be seen whether the director would get a chance to finish what he started. Gilliam realized his dream of adapting Don Quixote for the screen in 2002 with the release of the long-awaited Lost in La Mancha, and worked with Natalie Portman and Heath Ledger in 2009's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

Trivia: The "matinee idol" of the motley Monty Python crew, Eric Idle attended Cambridge University, where he served as president of the Footlights Revue. Idle's fellow college troupers included future Pythonites John Cleese and Graham Chapman. After getting his start on such TV series as Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Frost Report, Idle served as performer and co-writer for the zany weekly series Monty Python's Flying Circus. He remained a loyal Python throughout the group's many film, TV-special and book projects. On his own, Idle has co-starred in such films as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), Nuns on the Run (1990), Mom and Dad Save the World (1992), and Casper (1995). One of his best screen showings was his sidesplitting bit as an accident-prone cyclist in National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985). Among Idle's contributions to American television was his star turn as snobbish ghost Grant Pritchard in the 1989 comedy/fantasy series Nearly Departed. He starred in the 1990 farce Nuns on the Run, and three years later wrote and starred in the comedy Splitting Heirs. He continued to appear in various projects, often lending his voice to animated works like Quest for Camelot, The Secret of NIMH II, and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. He directed a second Rutles movie in 2003, and that same year appeared in the documentary about the tribute concert performed after George Harrison's death. He narrated Ella Enchanted in 2004, but the next year he would have one of the biggest successes of his career when he masterminded Spamalot, a smash-hit Broadway musical that reworked Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He appeared in the documentary The Aristocrats, and voiced Merlin in Shrek the Third. In 2011 he was one of the many pepole who discussed his relationship with George Harrison in Martin Scorsese's documentary about the former Beatle.

Trivia: British actor/satirist Michael Palin first demonstrated his writing and performing skills at Oxford University's Experimental Theatre Club. Almost immediately upon graduation, Palin was snatched up by the BBC, which made excellent use of his scathing wit and thespic versatility in such series as Twice a Fortnight and The Complete and Utter History of Britain. A relative latecomer to the fabled Monty Python troupe, Palin made up for lost time, writing and performing in the group's long-running TV series and in such big-screen projects as Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and Life of Brian (1978); he also wrote much of the musical score for Monty Python's the Meaning of Life (1983). To date, Palin and Cleese have been the two ex-Pythonites most active as solo performers. Palin was hilarious as the green-as-grass Reverend Charles Fort, ministering to "fallen women" ("Women who've tripped?") in The Missionary (1982) and as stuttering doofus Ken in A Fish Called Wanda (1988), winning a British Film Association award for the latter performance. Palin remained active in television into the 1990s with cheeky projects like Ripping Yarns (1976), Do Not Adjust Your Set (1977-79) and Palin's Column (1994). An inveterate globetrotter, Michael Palin channelled his wanderlust into several tongue-in-cheek TV miniseries, beginning with Around the World in 80 Days (1989). Palin mostly retired from acting after appearing in the Fish Called Wanda "sequel" Fierce Creatures in 1997, and has mainly focused on his travel documentaries in recent years.

Trivia: Hollow-cheeked character player Kenneth Colley acted in several of the "trendy," director-dominated films glutting the market of his native England in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Colley was seen in Michael Winner's The Jokers (1967), Richard Lester's How I Won the War (1968), Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) and The Music Lovers (1971). Many of the actor's later performances were in more conformist films like Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) and Return of the Jedi (1983) (as Admiral Piett), though in 1989 he was back with Ken Russell in The Rainbow (1989). Colley portrayed Lord Horatio Nelson in the four-part TV biography I Remember Nelson, telecast in America as part of the 1981-82 season of Masterpiece Theatre.

Trivia: British multi-hyphenate Chris Langham achieved fame and success over the course of four decades, as an actor, screenwriter, and occasional director, almost always in the comedic vein. Langham first cropped up during the early '70s, with guest appearances on at least two Spike Milligan specials and bit parts in such vehicles as The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Sink or Swim (1977). He netted broader recognition at the tail end of the decade, as a multi-role player in the Monty Python biblical spoof The Life of Brian, as one of the regulars on the seminal U.K. comedy series Not the Nine o' Clock News (1979), and one of the occasional scripters on Jim Henson's The Muppet Show. By the mid- to late '80s, the actor branched out into occasional dramatic turns, such as the 1985 telemovie Silas Marner and the 1988 docudrama Apprentice to Murder, but he continued to make greatest impact on U.K. television, in such popular series as Kiss Me Kate, Clive Anderson Talks Back, and Help.

Trivia: Born Terence Milligan. A British "army brat," he grew up in India, Burma, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), then moved to England in his mid teens. In 1936 he began his performing career as a singer and trumpeter. He became well known in the '50s on the English radio show Crazy People, which developed into the legendary Goon Show. He wrote much of his own comedy material for the show, and did the same on a number of TV series. He debuted onscreen in 1951, but -- although busy as a screen actor -- never achieved as much success in films as on radio and TV. He co-wrote the play The Bed-Sitting Room and authored several comic novels as well as books of nonsense and verse.

Trivia: Liverpudlian George Harrison, lead guitarist of the Beatles, was the youngest and, for many years, least appreciated of the Fab Four. Often labelled the "quiet Beatle" in the early 1960s, Harrison seemed so retiring and self-deprecating that the makers of the first Beatles flick A Hard Day's Night took pity on him and wrote him his own individual sequence. The result was the hilarious "shirt scene," wherein Harrison finds himself auditioning for a specious teen-oriented TV show (asked his opinion on some wretched "mod" clothing, Harrison replies "They're grotty.") For the next Beatles film Help (65), Harrison broke the Lennon-McCartney stranglehold on the musical score by writing the song "I Need You" -- a fact that we hear proclaimed over and over during the film's closing credits. While overwhelmed in the public eye by the charisma of his fellow Beatles, Harrison was the first to assert himself as an individual musical artist, recording the 1968 solo album Wonderwall Music while still a member of the group. After the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, Harrison was also the first of the four to make the charts with a hit song; on a more negative note, he was also the first to be involved in a serious lawsuit -- the plagiarism battle over "He's So Fine," which he eventually lost. Not having appeared in a film since 1974's Concert for Bangladesh, Harrison re-entered the movie business in the late 1970s as a producer, backing such films as Monty Python's Life of Brian (79), Time Bandits (82) and Brazil (84). He also occasionally played small, uncredited roles in such films as Shanghai Surprise (86) (for which he also contributed several songs). One of George Harrison's most ingratiating post-Beatles appearance was as a BBC announcer on the parody TV documentary The Rutles -- a merciless lampoon of a certain mop-topped foursome of the 1960s.

Trivia: Unlike many of his fellow Monty Python-ites, who were educated at Cambridge, actor/writer/director Terry Jones attended Cambridge's arch-rival Oxford, where he worked with the Experimental Theatre Club. Upon his graduation, Jones was hired as a BBC staff writer. From 1969 to 1972, he was one of the comedy conspirators on the internationally popular Monty Python's Flying Circus, remaining with the Python crowd through several theatrical films, serving as director on Monty Python's the Life of Brian (1979) and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983). On his own, he wrote and performed in the TV series Secrets, Ripping Yarns and So This is Progress. Terry Jones' non-Python film directorial efforts include Personal Services (1987) and Erik the Viking (1989, based on his own 1984 novel); he also wrote the screenplay for Labyrinth (1986) and adapted his stage play Consuming Passions for the screen in 1988.