Michael Palin, the Python Who Made Politeness a Passport and Is Still Testing Its Limits

Michael Palin

Photo: The National Churches Trust from London / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 5, 1943 Sheffield, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor, comedian, writer and travel presenter
Known for	Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Brazil
Awards	2 BAFTA · CBE · Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George

In Venezuela, nine or ten armed men from military intelligence held Michael Palin and his film crew for seven hours. Their offence was setting up a camera near a statue of Hugo Chávez. The men took down names and photographed every bag, and the mood only turned when one of them found the fish-slapping dance on YouTube. Palin said later that the rifles were shaking with joy. It is the most Palin story imaginable, and it carries the question his second career keeps asking: how far a courteous Englishman with a microphone can get by being liked, and what he misses on the way.

The courtesy was learned early, and under some pressure. Palin grew up in Sheffield, the son of Edward, an engineer whose stammer set the temperature of the household, and he went from Birkdale School to Shrewsbury and then to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read modern history. At Oxford he met Terry Jones. The pair wrote sketches together, sold material to The Frost Report and then performed in Do Not Adjust Your Set, a children’s programme that adults watched for the jokes. Around the same time he married Helen Gibbins, who spent more than half a century beside him and almost none of it in the spotlight.

Palin, born on 5 May 1943, was 26 when Monty Python’s Flying Circus arrived on the BBC in 1969, and he became its most useful utility player. He was the pet shop owner insisting the parrot was only resting, the lumberjack who discovers his love of women’s clothing halfway through a song, the cardinal nobody expects. John Cleese played the anger; Palin played the man trying to keep a straight face in front of it, which is harder. The films followed: Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975, Life of Brian in 1979, a Pontius Pilate who cannot pronounce his r’s in front of a giggling guard. When the troupe broke up, he and Jones made Ripping Yarns, a parody of Boy’s Own adventure stories, and he co-wrote Time Bandits with Terry Gilliam, released in 1981.

The film that changed his standing as an actor was A Fish Called Wanda, Charles Crichton’s 1988 caper written by Cleese. Palin played Ken, an animal lover with a crippling stammer, opposite Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline, and won the BAFTA for best supporting actor. He built the stammer from what he had watched in his father. Five years later the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children opened in London, carrying his name, and he has raised money for it ever since.

Here the agreeable public story starts to fray. The directors who used him best saw something cold under the warmth. In Gilliam’s Brazil he is Jack Lint, the cheerful family friend who turns out to be the state’s torturer, still smiling in his white coat. In Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin he is Molotov, a loyalist so eager to survive that he denounces his own wife as a traitor and welcomes her back the moment the line changes. Palin has said he dislikes the “nicest man in Britain” label, telling one interviewer that he is “quite a nice bloke, but also I can be very sulky, angry and impulsive.” The charge against his travel work is related. When he went to North Korea in 2018, critics wrote that he had seen only what his minders arranged, and a Telegraph headline called it a blinkered view. Palin did not entirely disagree. In his own journal he wrote that the minders had been playing a game: “We have been indulged, but never fully informed.”

The travel career began almost by accident. In 1989 the BBC sent him round the world in Phileas Fogg’s 80 days without boarding a plane, and Around the World in 80 Days made him the face of a genre. Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe followed, and the travel trade began to speak of a “Palin effect” on the places he passed through. He served as president of the Royal Geographical Society from 2009 to 2012. Then, after his 2012 series on Brazil, he moved to Channel 5 and to harder ground: North Korea, Iraq in 2022, Nigeria in 2024, Venezuela in 2025.

Alongside the cameras ran a writer’s discipline. Four volumes of diaries cover his life from 1969 to 2009, the most recent, There and Back, published in 2024. He has written two novels, Hemingway’s Chair and The Truth; a history of the polar ship Erebus; and Great-Uncle Harry, about a relative who died in the First World War. He was made a CBE in 2000, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013 and was knighted in 2019 for services to travel, culture and geography, the only Python to receive one. Helen died in May 2023. They had three children, and he still lives in Gospel Oak, in north London, where they settled in the 1960s.

Acting has not stopped. In February 2026 BBC Two launched Small Prophets, Mackenzie Crook’s comedy about a hardware store worker (Pearce Quigley) who grows tiny fortune-telling homunculi in jars; Palin plays Brian, his father, the man who hands over the recipe. The series reached Apple TV worldwide on 7 October 2026, and a second series has already been commissioned. In March 2026 he turned up in the cinema adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, one of three Know-Alls alongside Lenny Henry and Simon Russell Beale.

The latest journey is Michael Palin in the Philippines, a three-part Channel 5 series that began at the end of September. It takes him from Manila to the ruined city of Marawi and to Pag-asa, a garrisoned island in the contested South China Sea, a place where the usual charm is a less reliable pass. The tie-in book is out from Hutchinson Heinemann, and a 13-date theatre tour opened in Newbury on 7 October and closes in Bradford on 30 October. At 83, he is still finding out how much a polite question can open, and lately he has made a point of filming the doors that stay shut.

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Tags: actors, Michael Palin, Small Prophets, A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese, Life of Brian

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