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crew · Actor · Writer

1943-05-05 · Broomhill, Sheffield, England, UK · Male

63 series in the catalog

Sir Michael Edward Palin ( PAY-lin; born 5 May 1943) is an English actor, writer and television presenter. He was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2019.

Palin started in television working on programmes including the Ken Dodd Show, The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set. He joined Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974) alongside John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman. He acted in some of the most famous Python sketches, including "Argument Clinic", "Dead Parrot sketch", "The Lumberjack Song", "The Spanish Inquisition", "Bicycle Repair Man" and "The Fish-Slapping Dance". Palin continued to work with Jones away from Python, co-writing Ripping Yarns.

Palin co-wrote and starred in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983). For his performance in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) he received the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Other notable films include Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (1981), The Missionary (1982), A Private Function (1984), Brazil (1985), Fierce Creatures (1997) and The Death of Stalin (2017).

Since 1980, Palin has made numerous television travel documentaries and is a widely recognised writer and presenter. He has been a travel writer and travel documentarian in programmes broadcast on the BBC. His journeys have taken him across the world, including the North and South Poles, the Sahara, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe and Brazil; in 2018, he visited North Korea, documenting his visit to the isolated country in a series broadcast on Channel 5. Palin visited Nigeria in 2023 to make a travel documentary that was aired in 2024. From 2009 to 2012 he was president of the Royal Geographical Society.

Early life and education

Palin was born in 1943, in Ranmoor, Sheffield, the second child and only son of Edward Moreton Palin and Mary Rachel Lockhart. His father was a Shrewsbury and Cambridge-educated engineer working for a steel firm. His maternal grandfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Lockhart Ovey, DSO, was High Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1927.

Palin was educated at Birkdale School in Sheffield and later (like his father) at Shrewsbury School. His sister Angela was nine years his senior; despite the age gap, the two had a close relationship until her suicide in 1987. The Palin family has ancestral roots in Letterkenny, County Donegal. His great-grandmother fled to America from the Irish Famine and was adopted by a wealthy American family.

When he was five years old, Palin had his first acting experience at Birkdale, playing Martha Cratchit in a school performance of A Christmas Carol. At the age of 10, still interested in acting, he made a comedy monologue and read a Shakespeare play to his mother while playing all the parts.

After leaving Shrewsbury School in 1962, Palin went on to read modern history at Brasenose College, Oxford. With fellow student Robert Hewison he performed and wrote, for the first time, comedy material at a university Christmas party. Terry Jones, also a student at Oxford, saw that performance and began writing with Hewison and Palin. That year Palin joined the Brightside and Carbrook Co-operative Society Players and first gained fame when he won an acting award at a Co-op drama festival. He also performed and wrote in the Oxford Revue (called the Et ceteras) with Jones.

Early career

After finishing university in 1965, Palin became a presenter on a comedy pop show called Now! for the television contractor Television Wales and the West. At the same time, Palin was contacted by Jones, who had left university a year earlier, to help with writing a theatrical documentary about sex through the ages. Although this project was eventually abandoned, it brought Palin and Jones together as a writing duo and led them to write comedy for various BBC programmes, such as The Ken Dodd Show, The Billy Cotton Bandshow, and The Illustrated Weekly Hudd. They collaborated in writing lyrics for an album by Barry Booth called Diversions. They were also in the team of writers working for The Frost Report, whose other members included Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Vosburgh and future Monty Python members Graham Chapman, John Cleese and Eric Idle.

Although the members of Monty Python had already encountered each other over the years, The Frost Report was the first time all the British members of Monty Python (its sixth member, Terry Gilliam, was at that time an American citizen) worked together. During the run of The Frost Report the Palin/Jones team contributed material to two shows starring John Bird: The Late Show and A Series of Birds. For A Series of Birds the Palin/Jones team had their first experience of writing narrative instead of the short sketches they were accustomed to conceiving.

Following The Frost Report the Palin/Jones team worked both as actors and writers on the show Twice a Fortnight with Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Jonathan Lynn, and the successful children's comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set with Idle and David Jason. The show also featured musical numbers by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, including future Monty Python musical collaborator Neil Innes. The animations for Do Not Adjust Your Set were made by Terry Gilliam. Eager to work with Palin sans Jones, Cleese later asked him to perform in How to Irritate People together with Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. The Palin/Jones team were reunited for The Complete and Utter History of Britain.

Monty Python

On the strength of their work on The Frost Report and other programmes, Cleese and Chapman had been offered a show by the BBC, but Cleese was reluctant to do a two-man show for various reasons, among them Chapman's reputedly difficult personality. During this period Cleese contacted Palin about doing the show that ultimately became Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the same time the success of Do Not Adjust Your Set had led Palin, Jones, Idle and Gilliam to be offered their own series and, while it was still in production, Palin agreed to Cleese's proposal and brought along Idle, Jones and Gilliam. Thus the formation of the Monty Python troupe has been referred to as a result of Cleese's desire to work with Palin and the chance circumstances that brought the other four members into the fold.

Palin played various roles in Monty Python, which ranged from manic enthusiasm (such as the lumberjack of "The Lumberjack Song", or Herbert Anchovy, host of the game show "Blackmail") to unflappable calmness (such as the dead parrot seller or cheese shop proprietor). As a straight man he was often a foil to the rising ire of characters portrayed by Cleese. He also played timid, socially inept characters such as Arthur Putey, the man who sits quietly as a marriage counsellor (Eric Idle) has sex with his wife (Carol Cleveland), and Mr Anchovy, a chartered accountant who wants to become a lion tamer. He appeared as the "It's" man (a Robinson Crusoe-type castaway with torn clothes and a long, unkempt beard) at the beginning of most episodes. He also frequently played a Gumby, a character Palin said "had these moronic views that were expressed with extraordinary force".

Palin frequently co-wrote sketches with Terry Jones, including the "Spanish Inquisition sketch", which featured the catchphrase "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!". He also composed songs with Jones including "The Lumberjack Song", "Every Sperm Is Sacred" and "Spam". His solo musical compositions included "Decomposing Composers" and "Finland".

1974–1996: Ripping Yarns and film roles

In 1971, he co-wrote, with Hugh Leonard and Terence Feely, the film Percy, which depicts a penis transplant.

After the Monty Python television series ended in 1974, the Palin/Jones team worked on Ripping Yarns, an intermittent television comedy series broadcast over three years from 1976…