Biography

He was made an O.B.E. (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in the 2001 Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to comedy drama. In 2017 he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at the University of Leeds.

Co-author (with Graham Chapman) of "O Happy Day," a "lost" play which was discovered among Chapman's manuscripts and was finally produced nearly eleven years after Chapman's death. "O Happy Day" had its world premiere on September 22, 2000, at Dad's Garage Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia.

Noted for his Groucho Marx impersonations.

He never learned to drive a car.

Wrote gags for the elite of British comedy, including Morecambe & Wise, The Two Ronnies, Tommy Cooper, Marty Feldman, and countless others.

I've got a solid basis of insecurity.

We don't retire in my business, the phone stops ringing.

I remember bumping into John Cleese in Soho - he'd just done a voiceover and he wasn't much of a drinker but he pulled me into a pub and told me he was doing a sitcom. I said, "Oh no... another one. Everyone's doing a sitcom these days." He said, "No, we're working hard at it. It'll be all right." Understatement of the year. Fawlty Towers (1975) is perfect.

He [John Cleese] was great with the characters and the lines but needed Connie [Connie Booth] for the construction - she had a feeling for the plot and the arc. John has said that the pressure of working on the show ended the couple's ten-year marriage. Would they have gone on to produce a third series if they had stayed together? Would it have been as funny? Certainly the fact that they didn't helps immeasurably in ensuring its perfection. John himself says the only decent thing he's done since is A Fish Called Wanda (1988) (note: Cryer was wrong to say this as Cleese has acknowledged that Michael Frayn's script for Clockwise (1986) was very good). Maybe Connie was his muse.

Fawlty Towers (1975) took the essential ingredients of classic farce - at its most extreme in the dead body episode - and blended them with the key element of all great British sitcoms: a lead character who's class-obsessed and trapped by his situation. Mainwaring, Steptoe, even Brent... they're all trying to escape their class. Basil wants to run an elegant hotel but is constantly let down by his customers. Hilarity ensues.