John Cleese
Archie Leach
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Academy Awards, USA. 1989 Winner Oscar. Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Kevin Kline. 1989 Nominee Oscar. Best Director. Charles Crichton. 1989 Nominee Oscar. Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
A Fish Called Wanda: Directed by Charles Crichton, John Cleese. With John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, Michael Palin. In London, four very different people team up on a jewel heist, then try to double-cross one another for the loot, complicated by their efforts to fool a very proper barrister.
- Snoopystyle
- 1 min
- Charles Crichton, John Cleese
Jul 12, 2018 · July 12, 2018. Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin, Kevin Kline and Tom Georgeson in A Fish Called Wanda, 1988. From MGM/Photofest. There’s a fittingly dark footnote in the history of the classic ...
1989 Winner Oscar. Best Actor in a Supporting Role ... A Fish Called Wanda; 1984 Nominee BAFTA Film Award. Most Outstanding Newcomer to Film; Sophie's Choice ...
- October 24, 1947
- It Was Director Charles Crichton’s First Film in Two decades.
- Crichton and John Cleese Spent Five Years Writing The Film.
- It Was Inspired by The Ealing Comedies.
- The Actors Helped Shape Their characters.
- Kevin Kline’s Character Was Inspired by A Los Angeles Self-Help Guru.
- Cleese’s Character Was Named After Cary Grant.
- The Original Ending Was Much darker.
- Cleese Cut A Big Chunk of The Cathcart Towers Scene.
- One Audience Member Laughed Himself to death.
- It Was Nominated For Three Oscars.
Back in the 1950s, Charles Crichton was a famous director of Ealing Comedies—a series of comedy films produced by London’s Ealing Studios—who was known for his work on films like The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), Hue and Cry (1947), andThe Lavender Hill Mob(1951). By 1988, however, he hadn’t directed a feature film in two decades (though he had work...
A Fish Called Wanda was years, even decades, in the making. Cleese and Crichton first met and began discussing ideas for a comedy heist film, inspired by The Lavender Hill Mob, all the way back in 1969. Though they parted ways professionally, Cleese continued to look for opportunities to collaborate on a film with Crichton. More than a decade later...
Unsurprisingly, A Fish Called Wanda was heavily indebted to the Ealing Comedies, especially Crichton’s own The Lavender Hill Mob, a heist comedy which starred Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway as a pair of bumbling bank robbers. Cleese, however, claimed the parallels between the Ealing Comedies and A Fish Called Wandawere unintentional, but embrac...
Cleese encouraged Kevin Kline, Michael Palin, and Jamie Lee Curtis to contribute ideas and help develop their characters. Curtis, in particular, was responsible for major changes to Wanda’s personality. "She was a sexually brazen, cold-hearted manipulator, who simply wanted money,” Curtis toldThe New York Times. “I didn't find that real. I decided ...
InA Fish Called Wanda, Kline’s Otto is a pseudo-intellectual who constantly misinterprets everything from the teachings of Buddhist philosophy to the writings of Nietzsche. According to Cleese, his character was inspired by the real-life self-help guru Zen Master Rama, sometimes calledthe “yuppie guru.” “I got the real key to the character out of L...
Cleese named his character Archie Leach after movie star Cary Grant, who was born Archibald Leach. Though Cleese’s bumbling lawyer has little in common with the famously debonair Grant, Cleese explainedthat he chose the name because he and Grant shared a hometown, and because it was the closest he would ever get to “being Cary Grant.”
A Fish Called Wandastarted off as a much darker comedy, but test audiences in America were apparently uncomfortable with the film’s cruelty, and lack of romantic payoff, so Crichton and his cast went in for a few re-shoots. In addition to softening Palin’s character a bit, they ended up re-shooting the film’s ending three times. “We played the whol...
In addition to changing the ending, Cleese cut several minutes from the film’s penultimate scene, in which Archie tries to get the stuttering Ken (Palin) to telling him where Wanda, Otto, and the diamonds are. Ken, whose stutter gets worse under pressure, can’t seem to utter the two words “Cathcart Towers.” Initially, the scene was a Monty Python-e...
Ole Bentzen, a Belgian audience member, was so tickled by the scene in which Ken has French fries stuck up his nose, that he actually laughedhimself to death. The scene reminded him of a similar experience at a family dinner, in which his family had shoved cauliflower up their noses to great comic effect. He began laughing so hard, his heart rate e...
Comedy movies rarely fare well at the Oscars, butA Fish Called Wandawas an exception. The film was nominated for three awards: for Best Original Screenplay (for Cleese and Crichton), Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for Kevin Kline, who took home the statuette.
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Nov 5, 2013 · Best Supporting Actor, 1988. • Academy Award: Kevin Kline, A Fish Called Wanda. It’s been a quarter-century now, and I still can’t quite believe this happened. Kevin Kline’s deranged performance as the armpit-sniffing, Italian-spouting, pseudo-intellectual Otto in A Fish Called Wanda seemed far too uniquely brilliant for Oscar ...
The film. Culture. TV & Radio. ★★★★☆That rarest of things, a properly funny Anglo-American comedy. On one side, the Oxbridge-honed wit of John Cleese, Michael Palin and the director ...
