Michael Palin | Biography (born 1943)

Michael Palin

Born 1943

British Actor

It is difficult to know quite where Michael Palin stands in British film comedy. His solo vehicles have often presented him as the common man largely beset by some form of adversity or temptation. On somehow visualises him always in a pullover. A gentle, quick-witted man, he often seems to be attempting to stretch himself as an all-round writer, entertainer and guide through travels - whether the past, or the present of the hugely successful TV serials in which he goes around the world for the BBC. Even the Dalai Lama has seen them and is a fan! They are popular because Palin seems to be one of us going off to all the places we dream of going but never have the bottle, time or energy to do. But, of course, he is not one of us as with the success of the travel shows and subsequent books have brought him millions of pounds most of us can only dream of. Still the illusion that he is one of us is there and the strength of that illusion is Palin's strongpoint and the key to his success.

Michael Palin

But it is comedy, and his zany reputation from the Monty Python days that have pursued him like hawks. One always suspects that he will suddenly crook an everyday event into something quite absurb.

He was born in Yorkshire, studied history at Oxford and made his London West End stage debut in 1964. In the mid 1960s he broke into comedy writing for television, in such programmes as The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine and The Frost Report. Do Not Adjust Your Set, which ran for two season, united him with many of the comic talents that were to make up Monty Python's Flying Circus , which began its run in 1969. Involved in many of the Pythons' funniest sketches, Palin was the man who sold John Cleese a dead parrot in perhaps the best-remembered of them all. It was transferred to the big screen in the Pythons' film debut, And Now for Something Completely Different. Palin's speciality in its sketches was the simple-minded sould who confuses others with his lunatic innocence, varied with the occasional upper-class twit.

While playing central characters in the Python films that followed, Palin was also working on his own TV series - Ripping Yarns, which proved in many ways more inventive and certainly more satirical than the original Python shows. More Ripping Yarns followed.

Palin took solo spotlight for the first time in The Missionary, although he had a string supporting cast in this spasmodically funny comedy about a cleric who opens a home for fallen women and becomes a fallen missionary. Palin's comic thunder was largely stolen by Denholm Elliott and Michael Hordern in doddering cameos.

After several more Python films and videos, Palin was back in his pullover guise in A Private Function, very droll as a chiropodist who, in the days of wartime rationing, keeps a pig in the parlour.

Palin's quirkily inventive mind continued to seek diversification. He and long-time collaborator Terry Jones, also an ex-Python, wrote a play, Secrets, which was turned into a film, Consuming Passions, which was not well received.

Palin's profile was high after the international success of A Fish Called Wanda late in 1988, in which he and John Cleese had the brainwave of combining typically cruelly funny Pythonesque humour with Hollywood stars (Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline) in an Ealing Studio-type comedy about four unlikely bank robbers - The Lavender Hill Mob in new dressing. The frenetic comedy provided more of a character role for Palin, who played a stammering animal rights supporter whose stutter proves disruptive at vital times, but who is (a bit) wilier than he looks. The four stars tried the formula again for Fierce Creatures (1997) which was truly awful and is best rememered for John Cleese desperately promoting the film to any one who listen.

In the late 80s, Palin embarked for his 80-day trip around the world, which revealed more of the traveller and explorer in him. He also essayed a more serious film role (albeit with satirical undertones) in American Friends, a story of travel, romance and chicanery among Oxford dons (of whom Palin's script provided some wicked studies) based on a fragment from the diary of Palin's own great-grandfather. Asked what his hobbies were, this man of many parts once listed weaving, viniculture, tennis, ballooning, acupuncture, vibraphone construction, brass-rubbing, meteorology and fish!

f i l m o g r a p h y

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

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