Graham Chapman

The Doctor Who Preferred the Absurd

Graham Chapman had a medical degree in his pocket but chose to play King Arthur instead. At the University of Cambridge he joined the Footlights Club and swapped the scalpel for sketch scripts. It was in that setting that he met John Cleese and began forging one of the strangest creative partnerships in British television.

Chapman wasn't after cheap laughs or slapstick gags. His style was dry and often authoritative, because he projected a dignity that made his craziest characters seem real. Yet behind that facade of army officer or church authority lay total anarchy, which exploded in 1969 with the premiere of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

And the gamble paid off.

Unlike his fellow Pythons, Chapman brought the most surreal ideas and the twists nobody saw coming. In writing sessions he would often sit silent for hours, smoking his pipe while the others shouted over each other. Then he would suddenly drop a line that changed everything and turned a mediocre sketch into a cult classic. The group had to learn to cope with his constant unpredictability.

A Shoot Fueled by Gin

During the filming of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975, the actor was struggling with a severe alcohol addiction. He drank gin constantly and suffered tremors that made the action scenes in the Scottish mountains difficult. Even so, he delivered a performance that anchored the entire film while his fellow Pythons clowned around him.

His role as Brian in Life of Brian in 1979 is the peak of his technical career. By then he had quit drinking and was in enviable physical shape. But the shoot in Tunisia was a hellish mix of heat and religious pressure, which Chapman endured with a professional calm unusual for someone who tended to lose himself in his own delusions.

He was the Python who was best at dramatic acting.

In 1982, he took part in filming Yellowbeard alongside Peter Cook and Cheech & Chong. It was a personal project that turned out to be a critical and box office failure. The production suffered from budget problems and a script that kept falling apart, but Chapman defended the film to the end with a blind loyalty that baffled the industry.

Lying as a Way of Life

Chapman was always a man of contradictions who never hid his homosexuality at a time when the United Kingdom was still burdened by legal prejudice. In 1980, he published his memoir, A Liar's Autobiography, which blended real facts with outrageous inventions. The book showed that, for him, reality was simply a narrative suggestion.

In 1988, he was diagnosed with throat cancer that quickly spread to his spine. He kept working and recorded several scenes for the Pythons' 20th anniversary special despite his physical weakness. He died on October 4, 1989, just one day before the group celebrated two decades of existence.

It was his final heavy joke.

John Cleese delivered a eulogy full of insults and sarcasm, because that's what both of them would have wanted. In 2012, an animated film based on his life premiered, using voice recordings he had left behind before he died. The film's worldwide box office barely topped 800,000 dollars, making it clear that his humor was still too strange for the masses.

Graham Chapman died at the age of 48 in a hospital in Maidstone.