Eric Idle

Eric Idle

DOB: March 29, 1943
Where: South Shields, County Durham, England
Education: Pembroke College, Cambridge
Occupation: Actor, author, comedian, singer, writer
Years Active: 1969-present
Noted Work: Monty Python, The Rutles, Spamalot
Website: http://pythononline.com

-English comedian, actor and composer.
-Was a member of the British comedy group Monty Python

Early Life/Education
-Born to Nora Barron, a health visitor, and Ernest Idle. His father served in the Royal Air Force and survived World War II, only to be killed in a hitch hiking accident on Christmas Eve 1945. His mother had problems coping with a full time job and raising a child, so when Idle was 7, he was enrolled in the Royal Wolverhampton School as a boarder.
-According to him, "It was a physically abusive, bullying harsh environment for a kid to grow up in. I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority. Perfect training for Python."
-Idle said that 2 things made his life enjoyable. Those were listening to Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes and watching the local football team, the Wolverhampton Wanderers. Radio Luxembourg was famous then, because now famous British celebrities remember listening to when they grew up during WWII
-He also attended Cambridge University, meaning he is very highly educated

Career
-Idle started at Cambridge a year after future Pythons Graham Chapman and John Cleese. He started the children's TV comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set, costarring his future Python members Terry Jones and Michael Palin(both of whom are Oxford graduates).

Monty Python's The Life of Brian

Monty Python

Monty Python

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

-Idle wrote Monty Python by himself. The characters end up having verbal strangeness, such as the man who speaks in anagrams, the man who says words in the wrong order, the butcher who goes back and forth between rudeness and politeness every time he speaks.

Monty Python. Playing an upper class "twit"

-He is one of the youngest members of the team- year behind Cleese and Chapman at Cambridge. Idle was closest to the spirit of the students and teens who made up much of Python's fanbase. The sketches on the show dealt with then obsessions, like pop music, sexual permissiveness, recreational drugs. Idle's characters often include double entendre, sexual references, and other things considered bad.

-On Saturday Night Live, he and a bunch of guys created a parody of The Beatles called The Rutles. They even made a movie of it, called All You Need is Cash, a parody of the song All You Need is Love. It was a collaboration of Python members and Saturday Night Live hosts and crew. Actors appearing in the film included John Belushi, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner, and also musicians like George Harrison and Mick Jagger.

-When it came to movies, he appeared in various movies over the years. Like Terry Gilliams 1989 movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the 1990 movie Nuns on the Run alongside Robbie Coltrane, Casper(1995).
-He also appeared on 3 episodes of The Simpsons, as a famous documentarian named Declan Desmond.
-In the 2007 movie Shrek the Third, he provided the voice for hippie-like Merlin the Magician, alongside former Python John Cleese, who did the voice of King Harold.

Nuns on the Run

The Simpsons

Merlin the Magician

Personal Life
-Married an Australian woman named Lyn Ashley in 1969. She appeared in Monty Python occasionally. They divorced in 1975. They have one son named Carey, born in 1973.
-He married his current wife, Tania Kosevich, an American, in 1981. They have one daughter, Lily, born in 1990. He has lived in Los Angeles since the early 1990s

Filmography