Early Life and Education
Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, the only child of Muriel Evelyn (née Cross; 1899–2002), and Reginald Francis Cleese (1893-1972), who worked in insurance sales. His family's surname was previously "Cheese", but his father changed it to "Cleese" in 1915, upon joining the Army.
Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School, where he was a star pupil, receiving a prize for English studies and doing well at sports, including cricket and boxing. At 13, he received an exhibition to Clifton College, an English public school in Bristol. He was tall as a child and was well over 6 ft when he arrived there. While at the school, he is said to have defaced the school grounds for a prank by painting footprints to suggest that the school's statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket for the First XI team and, after initial indifference, he did well academically, passing 8 O-Levels and 3 A-Levels in mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
After leaving school, he went back to his prep school to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in Life of Brian, in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti) before taking up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, where he read, or studied, Law and joined the Cambridge Footlights.
At the Footlights theatrical club, he met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue I Thought I Saw It Move, and was Registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962, as well as being one of the cast members for the 1962 Footlights Revue Double Take!
Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with a 2:1. Despite his successes on The Frost Report, his father would send him cuttings from the Daily Telegraph offering management jobs in places like Marks and Spencer.
Read more about this topic: John Cleese
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“They borrow words for thoughts they cannot feel,
That with a seeming heart their tongue may speak;
And in their show of life more dead they live
Than those that to the earth with many tears they give.”
—Jones Very (1831–1880)
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)