Biography

His wide travels are so well known that he now has his own travel website called "Palin's Travels.".

Credits fellow Python Terry Gilliam with getting him to quit smoking. Gilliam had been having dinner with Palin and his wife Helen at the Palins' home one evening in April 1969. Afterwards, Michael discovered he had run out of cigarettes and became increasingly panicky when he failed to find coins for the cigarette slot machine up the road anywhere. Gilliam, half joking, half worried, called Michael an addict, resulting in Michael denying himself a cigarette and never buying a pack again.

His father had a rather serious stutter. This came in handy when he played Ken (the stuttering thief) in A Fish Called Wanda (1988).

He is a graduate of Oxford with a degree in History.

The Pythons had little idea how fanatical their American audience had become until they performed the live Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982) live shows that were soon immortalized. According to Carol Cleveland, as the group were exiting backstage one night, a 20-something girl ran up to Palin, screamed "Oh, Michael!", and promptly fainted in his arms. Palin had to pass the girl to others to help, as he was literally shocked into speechlessness.

[From an interview about the late Graham Chapman]: "He always regarded death as highly overrated and could never understand why anybody made such a fuss about it".

I was an enormous fan of The Beatles. When Terry Jones and I were writing together during the 60s, whenever a new Beatles album came out we were at the shop first thing to get our copy. We put off a day's writing to get to grips with the White Album. It influenced us very much, not just the music but what The Beatles stood for, a quality they had in their music and their writing that was so different to the pop we'd grown up with in the 50s and early 60s. We loved the lyrics and the poetry, as well as the humour in it. The Beatles represented something sort of young and fresh that we hoped we were also a part of.

We've had disagreements over the years about lifestyle and business and money, and all the things peripheral to what we do best of all, which is produce comedy. The one thing that hasn't changed is our enjoyment of each other's sense of humour. I've always been wary of a Python reunion because we don't have Graham Chapman, who was such an important part of Python. He had his problems - he was a self-confessed alcoholic - but, God, he was a good actor and an odd, eccentric writer, too. We'd miss him if we got back together.

The freedom to do what I wanted to do was much more important to me than the shackles of stardom. The more money you earn, the higher your status, the more people are around you. I don't know how people like Johnny Depp operate. He's got about 40 or 50 people who look after his life. My people are my wife and my kids and my grandsons.

I'm not that ambitious. I didn't have a goal. I wanted to write well, act well and bring up my family well and sometimes you couldn't do one and the other at the same time.