Graham Chapman

Graham Chapman was born in Leicester in 1941. He grew up in the Midlands, studied medicine at Cambridge and joined the Footlights, where he began working with John Cleese. He qualified as a doctor but chose a career in comedy.

As one of the six members of Monty Python, Chapman brought a calm, authoritative presence to increasingly absurd situations. His Colonel interrupted sketches that had become “too silly”; in the films he played King Arthur in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) and Brian in “Life of Brian” (1979).

Chapman spoke publicly about being gay in the early 1970s, when few prominent British entertainers did so. He supported “Gay News” and shared much of his adult life with David Sherlock. Sherlock was also among the collaborators on Chapman’s deliberately unreliable memoir, “A Liar’s Autobiography”.

Alcohol dependence caused serious problems during his early career, but he stopped drinking in 1977. He died of cancer in 1989, aged 48, one day before the twentieth anniversary of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. At his memorial, Cleese answered grief with the irreverence that their work had made possible.