For a man whose financial security was famously imperilled after a costly divorce from his third wife nearly 20 years ago, John Cleese has not lost his silliness or, it seems, his generosity of spirit.
His bruising separation from the psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger in the mid-Noughties burnt a £15 million hole in his pocket, meaning that a gentle retirement was no longer on the cards. From his famously embittered-sounding Alimony Tour in 2011 up to his present punishing work schedule, he is still mending his finances. But that didn’t stop him recently signing over the lease to what he says is his only remaining property — a flat in Chelsea — to his fourth wife, the 53-year-old Bath-born jewellery designer Jennifer Wade.
“The third wife got two properties, one was in London and one was in New York, and we had to sell the other three. I’ve actually given the flat behind Peter Jones to Jennifer, so I don’t have a house, I don’t have a car,” he tells me with an almost gleeful cackle when we meet over breakfast at a restaurant in Millbank, the heart of Westminster politics and seat of an establishment whose pomposity Cleese has pricked for as long as he has performed comedy (or silly walks). There is something of the cheerful outsider about the way he happily repeats a joke he had just made on social media about his money issues. “What’s the difference between a famous singer and a famous comedian? About $200 million.”
So why has he been so fantastically generous? Suddenly he becomes serious. “I [did it] to make her feel secure,” he says. “I think the greatest, saddest thing about our world is how many women feel unsafe … that’s not a good society.”
Does he mean women walking streets or something else? “I mean in general, emotionally, they don’t feel very secure. And I think if they have a property, they know that I can’t kick her out … it’s taken anxiety away from her that I think she wasn’t totally aware of.”
He beams whenever he talks about the women in his life — Wade, his only English wife, plus his daughters, Cynthia, 54 (whose mother was his first wife, Connie Booth), and Camilla, 41 (from his second marriage, to the actress Barbara Trentham). His nickname for Wade is Fish because of her fanatical devotion to swimming. (“If I say to her, ‘Would you be interested in going to Egypt to look at the Pyramids?’ she says, ‘What are the pools like?’”) They married in 2012 but she’s liked Cleese for longer. When she was a teenager living in Madrid, he tells me with another hoot, Wade watched his classic hotel sitcom Fawlty Towers on video. She told Cleese that she “always fancied Basil”. Imagine.
It’s good to see him so happy. He is said to be an awkward interview subject and his vinegary remarks about his ex-wife have probably compounded that impression. Surely someone who has scaled creative heights in sketch comedy with the Pythons, satire with The Frost Report, film (the Python movies plus Clockwise and A Fish Called Wanda) and, recently, live performance should have more to show for it.
He says he has no need for a house anyway because he “lives in hotel rooms”, and reels off an exhausting itinerary for an upcoming stage tour of Scandinavia: 12 shows of reminiscences in Sweden, three in Oslo (he thinks), then on to Belgium, Holland and Germany.“If you lose your nest egg at 70 then there’s not much alternative,” he says, laughing again. “I could have married somebody rich.”
He also brought Fawlty Towers back to the stage for a successful revival last year. It is returning through the West End and a national tour this summer. He is hoping to resurrect his hit films The Life of Brian and A Fish Called Wanda as live experiences as well. Let’s not forget, he’s 85.
“When I was young, 85 meant you were dead,” he says and laughs again. So does he have a secret to a long life? “Yes, I think so. I came from a lower-middle-class background. My dad was an insurance salesman and my mum was a housewife and they never did anything to excess. Probably because they didn’t have the money. [Growing up] I don’t remember seeing homeless people, I don’t remember seeing addicts, I don’t remember seeing alcoholics. These were all outside my experience completely. I mean, there were one or two people in Weston-super-Mare, and we all knew that they liked to drink, which is the way it was put. But I never saw anybody out of control or anything like that. And then, when drugs came out, I was surprisingly ignorant about them because for some reason I’d never been interested.”
Well, up to a point. Twenty years ago, he tells me, he took LSD under the supervision of an expert, who he doesn’t name for obvious reasons. “I just wanted to know what it was all about. The man was one of the world experts on it so I felt perfectly safe. I got scared for about ten minutes in the middle, and he and his wife saw me through that. But it was extraordinary to realise how fertile the human mind is.”
He has never been much of a boozer. “I never really wanted to. It wasn’t quite losing control … I didn’t really want to lose my grasp of reality.”
He remembers being very drunk once in his life when he was a Cambridge law undergraduate and a friend (now a professor of medicine) spiked his Yugoslavian riesling with gin on a night when said friend (whom he names, but I shan’t) later got into what sounds like a Pythonesque fight with “the son of the secretary-general of the UN”.
While he may not have been around heavy drinkers growing up, Graham Chapman, Cleese’s writing partner on Python, was a committed drinker. Cleese talks compassionately about how Chapman’s alcohol consumption became a problem during the second series of Python and the team’s sudden realisation one morning that “Gray” had downed half a bottle of vodka before breakfast.
“It was as if he couldn’t look after himself, almost. And then with the drink he became angry and then he became much more, I would say naughty rather than aggressive. He was almost too angerless, if you know what I mean. It was as though he was frightened of anger, or something.”
Of course Chapman isn’t the only person Cleese has lost. To coincide with the 50th anniversary of Fawlty Towers this year — the first episode aired on September 19, 1975 — he has written a book about the show that is part reminiscence, part guide for aspiring comedy scriptwriters. He says he got depressed thinking about how many are no longer with us.
“All these lovely people. Geoffrey Palmer, Joan Sanderson, Ken Campbell, Bernard Cribbins, all these wonderful people that I’d really enjoyed working with, all dead. Every time somebody came up and I thought, are they still alive? Dead! And I started getting a bit depressed and it was just loss, really, a realisation of the loss. I ought to warn your readers that when you get to your eighties, you’re not prepared. I think Philip Roth once finished one novel about old age by saying it’s a massacre.”
Cleese has long been open about his therapy, co-writing the book Families and How to Survive Them in 1983 with the psychiatrist Robin Skynner. Being married to so many Americans helped him turn to the talking cure earlier than most Brits and he was delighted to find in Skynner someone who “seemed to understand better how people work than anyone I had met”.
Still, when the Families book was published, he says that bookshops didn’t know which section to display it in (he once found it in comedy next to a tome by Les Dawson). Now, of course, you can’t move for self-improvement manuals. Does he think we go on about hurt feelings too much these days?
“Yes … too much. You see now all these Americans suddenly are on the internet because they’re talking about the way they’ve been badly treated. You want to say, ‘And?’ It’s, ‘Look what a wonderful person I am talking about my problems.’”
Cleese says his father and his generation got it right when emoting. “Although he was only an insurance salesman he modelled himself on one or two of the officers he’d met in the First World War, [who] he thought were really wonderful people. Of course they were pretty much upper-class in those days. He was just very impressed with the way they handled [themselves]. It was considered bad manners, bad form, to tell other people about your problems because you shouldn’t burden them. You handle your problems yourself, and then you’re cheerful and friendly. That was the belief. Stiff upper lip but even more flexible than that. In a way it was an honour to keep your sorrow to yourself and not splurging it over other people’s lives.”
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He has had therapy “on and off”, returning to the couch after his second marriagebroke down towards the end of the 1980s. This bout wasn’t as helpful as he hoped but it hasn’t put him off.
“I’ve occasionally talked to people since but I haven’t for a long time. I think I’m going to find a Jungian, because Jung was very, very good on the second half of life. And I think as you approach death there’s more of an awareness of it.”
Physically he seems in good nick, although he has “plenty of tummy” as well as type 2 diabetes, which means that the removal of a bone spur on a big toe continues to cause issues.
“If you’re slightly diabetic … and if you’re dealing with the extremities, they heal very slowly,” he says. Exercise, when he can do it, is confined to walking “because my knee collapsed in the middle of making [the 1986 film] Clockwise and I wasn’t able to play games after that”.
Unlike many tall people (he’s 6ft 4in), he doesn’t have back problems, his “good posture” owing much to his early discovery of the Alexander technique and regular sessions with “a lovely German lady in Blenheim Crescent”. He also has stem-cell therapy at a longevity clinic in Switzerland called Clinique La Prairie, a rare boon from his third wife (he jokingly struggles to say the word “wife”, meaning it comes out as a ghostly, painful howl), who got him into it.
He tries not to “become obsessed” by the wounds of his last divorce. It is a cliché that laughter is the best medicine but it is one he adheres to.
His opposition to what he calls the “woke” phenomenon is well documented. He believes the tide is changing in the US more than in the UK but has just had a meeting with potential collaborators where, he claims, various objections were put against his proposed A Fish Called Wanda musical, including the claim that the Wanda character (played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the 1988 film) is “objectified”, and that the film unforgivably mocks stutterers and shows harm to animals. It means the project is at an “impasse”. But he hasn’t lost his relish for sounding off against the “joyless f***ers” he believes continue to police comedy.
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“I think that their main fault is they don’t understand that all comedy is critical. You cannot write something funny about someone who is kind, honest, friendly, co-operative — they’re not funny. It’s the faults, our faults, human faults, that are funny, and they think that pointing faults out is unkind, whereas it’s actually how we improve.
“What I noticed very early on was that very pompous people don’t like a humorous atmosphere because it’s very hard to play ‘I’m superior to you’ if everyone’s laughing. They like a solemn atmosphere. With solemnity you are safe pretending you’re more important than other people. Comedy is a very democratising force … and laughter moves us to a part of our mind where we can cope with difficulties better.” Long may he be silly.
Fawlty Towers: The Play, Apollo Theatre, London, Jun 24 to Sep 13, then UK tour until Jul 25, 2026; fawltytowerstour.co.uk
John Cleese’s perfect weekend
Torquay or Trinidad?
I’ve never been to Trinidad. Torquay
Signature dish?
Linguine alle vongole
Netflix or iPlayer
Neither. I’m completely mystified by most of the stuff they do on Netflix because there’s a lot of talent there, why aren’t they doing anything interesting?
Fry-up or green juice?
Neither
A lark or an owl?
I used to be an owl and now I’ve turned into a lark
And what’s the screensaver on your phone?
One of my cats. I have four. Most of whom are larger than my wife
What’s the last thing you googled?
Over dinner last night I googled an actress I was told we might be able to use in Life of Brian playing the wife of Pontius Pilate
