Michael Palin was born on the 5th May 1943, in Broomhill, Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and is a BAFTA-winning actor, comedian, writer and TV presenter, best known as one of the members of the Monty Python comedy group. Palin has had notable roles in such series as the “Do Not Adjust Your Set” (1967-1969), “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” (1969-1974), and “Ripping Yarns” (1976-1979), as well as Python films, and several well-regarded documentaries and travel programs in recent years..
Have you ever wondered how rich Michael Palin is, as of mid- 2017? According to authoritative sources, it has been estimated that Palin’s net worth is high as $25 million, an amount earned through his successful career in the entertainment industry, which started in 1967. In addition to appearing on television and in movies, Palin has written numerous travel books, which have improved his wealth too.
Michael Palin Net Worth $25 Million
Michael Palin was the second child of Mary Rachel Lockhart and Edward Moreton Palin, an engineer who worked for a steel firm. Palin went to Birkdale Preparatory School, Sheffield, and then switched to the Shrewsbury School, and had various roles in the school productions of Shakespeare plays. He then went to Brasenose College of Oxford University, graduating in 1965 with a BA degree in history, but where he took part in various theatrical productions including with The Oxford Revue, and met Terry Jones, a future ‘Python’ colleague with whom he began writing while in 1967, Michael appeared in two episodes of “A Series of Bird’s”.
From 1967 to 1969, Palin played alongside Denise Coffey, Eric Idle, and David Jason in 21 episodes of “Do Not Adjust Your Set”, while from 1969 to 1974, he was a part of one of the best-rated comedy television series ever, entitled “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. Palin played in all 46 episodes with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle and Terry Jones, with Terry Gilliam as illustrator, and many other actors. His part in the worldwide popular show increased his net worth significantly, and helped him to secure notable roles in the future.
In the early ‘70s, Palin starred in Ian MacNaughton’s comedy “And Now for Something Completely Different” (1971), an anthology of the best sketches from the first two seasons of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. In 1972, Michael appeared in “Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus”, while in 1975, he co-starred in Terry Gilliam’s and Terry Jones’ “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, a story focused on King Arthur and his search for the Holy Grail. and which proved very popular not only in the ‘70s, but it is still popular today. Also in 1975, Palin played alongside Tim Curry in Stephen Frears’ comedy “Three Men in a Boat”, while from 1976 to 1979, he starred in nine episodes of the TV series “Ripping Yarns”.
Palin had a lead part in Terry Gilliam’s “Jabberwocky” (1977), and a year later, he appeared in “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” (1978). Michael ended the ‘70s in Terry Jones’ “Life of Brian” (1979) with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, and Eric Idle, among others – the parody about Jesus Christ wasn’t very popular in the US, but it earned more than $36 million worldwide, additionally improving Palin’s wealth. Michael continued to play in the movies, and he had a part and wrote the script for “Time Bandits” (1981) with Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall and John Cleese. In 1982, he wrote and starred alongside Maggie Smith as the Rev. Charles Fortesque in Richard Loncraine’s comedy “The Missionary”. The next year, Palin played in a BAFTA-nominated movie “The Meaning of Life” (1983), another Python collaboration, while in 1984, he teamed up with Maggie Smith again in a BAFTA-winning “A Private Function”.
In 1985, Palin had a part in the Oscar Award-nominated “Brazil” with Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist and Robert De Niro, while in 1988 he won the BAFTA for a supporting role in the Oscar -winning Charles Crichton’s “A Fish Called Wanda” starring John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline. In the early ‘90s, Michael appeared in seven episodes of the series “G.B.H.” (1991) and later played alongside Steve Coogan, Eric Idle and Terry Jones in “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” (1996).
After his part in the comedy “Fierce Creatures” (1997) with John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline, Palin took a break from acting and focused on writing instead. He wrote numerous travel books – some based on TV documentaries such as “Around the World in Eighty Days”(1989) and “Pole to Pole” in 1992 – children books, diaries, and contributed to “The Pythons Autobiography” in 2003. Michael then returned to acting and starred in the mini-series “Remember Me” (2014), while his most recent work was as a narrator in the animation show entitled “Clangers” (2015-2016). At the moment, Palin is filming “The Death of Stalin” and will play Vyacheslav Molotov. The movie will be released in October this year.
Regarding his personal life, Michael Palin has been married to Helen Gibbins since 1966, and has three children with her.
BAFTA Fellowship, BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Patron's Gold Medal, The British Comedy Academy Lifetime Achievement Award
Music Groups
Monty Python
Nominations
Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, British Academy Television Award for Best Actor, BAFTA Best Original Song Written for a Film, DVD Premier Award for Best Audio Commentary, New Release
Movies
Monty Python's Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, A Fish Called Wanda, And Now for Something Completely Different, A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman, Time Bandits, The Missionary, Jabberwocky, Brazil, A Private...
TV Shows
Monty Python's Flying Circus, Sahara with Michael Palin, Pole to Pole, Brazil with Michael Palin, Himalaya with Michael Palin, Michael Palin's New Europe, Michael Palin: Around the World in 80 Days, Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure, Full Circle with Michael Palin, Clangers, Ripping Yarns, G.B.H.,...
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Trademark
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Silly characters undone mainly by their own foolishness
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Frequently the most abused, ill-fated characters in a given Monty Python sketch or film
I'm a Wallander (2008) fan. Another favourite is Mad Men (2007) and, on radio, almost anything on BBC 6 Music, which takes me out of my musical comfort zone.
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[on the different kinds of fans he meets] One are the people who know me from Python, and want a bit of a laugh, especially if they've had a drink or two. A lot of the others now are people who've seen me traveling, and they're slightly more sober, and they're just interested in travel, where I've been, all that sort of thing. And the third lot are the people who've seen Ripping Yarns, who, like George Harrison, I revere.
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[Explaining how Terry Gilliam, unlike himself, has carved out a film career] Gilliam is a battler. He's like some sort of samurai warrior; wherever he goes, there are corpses.
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Being feted in Hollywood is quite irresistible. They are very warm and very generous. But as soon as the takings go down and you have a bad third week, the calls aren't returned.
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[on Robin Williams] He could do it all, he could do absolutely everything, and he could do everybody.
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[on the thought of performing with Robin Williams] It would have been like being invited to play in a jazz band when you couldn't play an instrument.
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[on the death of Robin Williams] His ear for mimicry was superb and he could do parody brilliantly. I can imagine that having that ability is a bit like being possessed - the devil of comedy is in you and it must have been hard to live with.
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Fame really is a trap. When I start complaining about this, [my wife] Helen quite rightly says: 'Well, here's an idea: don't make another 10-part television series.' But fame would cut anybody off from the kind of things that I like to do, [such as] observing the world. Learning about trains. Discovering new music. You also find yourself bearing other people's expectations. I don't want to bear anybody's expectations. I just want to do... what I can do. And to be judged on that. All of this comes back to what Ernest Hemingway said: 'Don't talk about writing; just write.' And I sometimes tend to think: 'Don't talk about living; just live.'
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When I read profiles of myself I sometimes think: I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out. To be absolutely frank with you, I'm still not sure I understand them. Then these people wander in, and suddenly they've cracked it in half-an-hour. I always assumed that, with age, I would understand myself better. Unfortunately, it's proving to be quite the opposite. I'm no closer to defining what it is that I really am than I ever was - other than somebody who is intensely curious about life.
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I loved Spike Milligan, yet I never realised, until I got to know him, that this person, who made me so happy, was desperate, and that writing the comedy I adored was tearing his life apart. When I interviewed him for Comic Roots (1982), I asked him what it felt like to work on The Goon Show (1968). He said, 'It was like one good summer.'" What a moving phrase that is. 'One good summer'. Something fleeting, that you can never recapture. That sense of: was it all just a dream? I think it was extremely perceptive of Spike to say that.
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People look for patterns in everything. It's what keeps us sane, I suppose. I struggle to see any patterns in my life. I think I can understand depression a bit because of my sister. My own feelings of ... I'm aware that, if you feel down, it can be strangely unrelated to circumstances around you. That's just the way life is.
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[Michael's sister Angela] so much wanted to act. She never got big parts; it didn't really work out for her. But I think she had depression going way back. She was gifted, intelligent and very funny. But for some reason she just couldn't value herself enough.
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No, I don't think [my father] quite... got Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969). Also, he was developing Parkinson's and the medication was giving him hallucinations. Graham Chapman was a medical man, as you know. He was fascinated by the fact that my father was seeing hamsters running up his trouser leg. In fact, my mother would have to retrieve them and put them in a bag ... I was grateful then that we could laugh, and Graham found it extraordinary that it was so surreal and Pythonic. My mother, bless her, defended Python. I don't know how much she understood it.
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We did enjoy writing sketches about Marcel Proust. And we were actually trying to debunk that sort of elitism. But you do have to know about something, in order to debunk it. Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) has suffered from very high praise. There were some things that quite laboriously didn't work. The television shows were, as you suggest, uneven. Really good material was in there, among a lot of dross. I still think some of the obscure stuff is good, and often needed to be there.
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Well, John Cleese, of course, is from Weston-super-Mare. So he knows all about pleasure and fulfillment. I think he set himself a very high standard of achievement and possibly feels he never quite attained it. He's always moving: first to New York, then to California, now Monaco. Where next? I always wanted to say to him: 'John, you're so talented. You have a lovely wife and kids; just relax.' But there was always something more that he wanted, to a point that was almost destructive.
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Something about John Cleese was always very unsettled, I felt. There was always something else he wanted to do. He seemed constantly driven by this sense that there was a nirvana somewhere; some unique place where mind, body and soul would be utterly satisfied.
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I met [John Cleese] on The Frost Report (1966), after which he was offered all sorts of things, but he rang me up instead, and decided to do Python. Which was quite a risk, for a man so driven by success. When we were collaborating, the only question was: does this work or not? He was very funny, and he appreciated good writing from others. So that was fine. Until the third series, when John clearly wanted to go, and people started to ask why. Whenever humour is taken out of the equation, the Pythons don't necessarily get along that well. Comedy brought us together.
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I just loved acting with [John Cleese]. Perhaps because there was no competition between us. I was short and he was tall. He was imperious and I was defensive. He needed me and I needed him. It made those shop sketches, like the dead parrot, extremely enjoyable to do. Me trying to be endlessly obliging, him being increasingly aggressive.
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Yes. Until [meeting the future members of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) I had been a very obliging kind of a guy. Having to defend your material, in that company... you just couldn't be diffident. Also, I realised that I was quite good at it. They gave me great confidence.
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[I'm] one of that cursed generation doomed to take nothing seriously.
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[My father] was always confronting people. Bus conductors, waitresses: he felt everyone was laying traps and should be treated with suspicion. There was always tension when he was around. I found it deeply embarrassing. That's why I hate rows and try to avoid confrontation.
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I couldn't say that I was frightened of my father. But I never felt totally comfortable with him. Perhaps because of his stammer. When you just can't get the words out, it distances you. And it placed you - as an articulate child - in the awkward position of being able to do something which he, the adult, couldn't. I imagine that could be enervating. That might have been it. My father did have a slight tendency to put down anything I did. I don't think he meant it.
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I have never claimed to be the nicest man in the world. That's a cliché that has somehow come to be widely accepted. It drives [wife] Helen mad. As she and my children [Tom, Will and Rachel, now all grown-up] will testify, I have a short fuse over certain things. Like if the one-inch nails are not where they should be in the box, and they've been moved to the three-inch section. [Pantomime bellow] Who did this?
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I am certainly more interested in interviewing than being interviewed. Sometimes you find yourself attacked from the start.
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Fame changes everything. When you're well-known, you're expected to be different. Some people assume you must have a yacht, and four homes. Or that you're famous because you are 'A Decent Man'. Just think of the number of people who do selfless work in this country every day; nobody has even heard of them.
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I don't see why it should be remarkable that you can acquire a reputation for fairness and decency. Those are qualities shared by so many people. And the great majority of people I meet are decent people, just trying to navigate their way through the world without causing too much trouble.
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I thought the Fish Called Wanda (A Fish Called Wanda (1988)) script was awful when John (John Cleese) first showed it to me ... and it's the most successful film I've ever done.
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People tend to think that those in showbiz are awful, apart from a couple of us like Gary Lineker and myself, who are nice. I think Gary is married to a younger woman now so he's lost a few points and doesn't have to be nice anymore. Lucky him!
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I'm not that ambitious. I didn't have a goal. I wanted to write well, act well and bring up my family well and sometimes you couldn't do one and the other at the same time.
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The freedom to do what I wanted to do was much more important to me than the shackles of stardom. The more money you earn, the higher your status, the more people are around you. I don't know how people like Johnny Depp operate. He's got about 40 or 50 people who look after his life. My people are my wife and my kids and my grandsons.
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We've had disagreements over the years about lifestyle and business and money, and all the things peripheral to what we do best of all, which is produce comedy. The one thing that hasn't changed is our enjoyment of each other's sense of humour. I've always been wary of a Python reunion because we don't have Graham Chapman, who was such an important part of Python. He had his problems - he was a self-confessed alcoholic - but, God, he was a good actor and an odd, eccentric writer, too. We'd miss him if we got back together.
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I was an enormous fan of The Beatles. When Terry Jones and I were writing together during the 60s, whenever a new Beatles album came out we were at the shop first thing to get our copy. We put off a day's writing to get to grips with the White Album. It influenced us very much, not just the music but what The Beatles stood for, a quality they had in their music and their writing that was so different to the pop we'd grown up with in the 50s and early 60s. We loved the lyrics and the poetry, as well as the humour in it. The Beatles represented something sort of young and fresh that we hoped we were also a part of.
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[From an interview about the late Graham Chapman]: "He always regarded death as highly overrated and could never understand why anybody made such a fuss about it".
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Fact
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Credits fellow Python Terry Gilliam with getting him to quit smoking. Gilliam had been having dinner with Palin and his wife Helen at the Palins' home one evening in April 1969. Afterwards, Michael discovered he had run out of cigarettes and became increasingly panicky when he failed to find coins for the cigarette slot machine up the road anywhere. Gilliam, half joking, half worried, called Michael an addict, resulting in Michael denying himself a cigarette and never buying a pack again.
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Son of Edward and Mary Palin. He had one sister called Angela.
Wrote and acted for Oxford's equivalent of the Cambridge Footlights.
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While a majority of his ancestry is English, one of his paternal great-grandmothers was Irish.
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London, England: Publication of his memoir 'Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988' [August 2011]
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After Sarah Palin's nomination for John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential elections got announced, someone made a YouTube video saying that the wrong Palin got chosen. It proposed Michael Palin, jokingly using clips of him from movies and skits as evidence that he was right for the nomination.
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Was born the son of an engineer in the industrial city of Sheffield, and remains a supporter of Sheffield United Football Club.
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In addition to attending the exclusive Shrewsbury School, and later, the University of Oxford; as a lad, he also attended Birkdale School in Sheffield.
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His wide travels are so well known that he now has his own travel website called "Palin's Travels.".
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The Pythons had little idea how fanatical their American audience had become until they performed the live Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982) live shows that were soon immortalized. According to Carol Cleveland, as the group were exiting backstage one night, a 20-something girl ran up to Palin, screamed "Oh, Michael!", and promptly fainted in his arms. Palin had to pass the girl to others to help, as he was literally shocked into speechlessness.
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In a quest for a "Peter Jonesy sort of voice", the casting crew for the original radio series, "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" approached Palin to play the part of The Book (he turned the part down). The part was eventually given to the very "Peter Jonesy" Peter Jones.
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His father had a rather serious stutter. This came in handy when he played Ken (the stuttering thief) in A Fish Called Wanda (1988).
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The public voted him the best-looking member of the Python troupe.
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The Virgin Super Voyager train number 221 130 named after him.
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He is an old boy of the ultra-exclusive and expensive English public school, Shrewsbury School. The section of Monty Python's Meaning of Life (1983) set in the school of "Sudbury" is a reference to his time there.
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Whilst filming Full Circle with Michael Palin (1997), Palin helped to hatch a baby crocodile and asked the crew to get a shot of himself with a crocodile in his hand.
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Attended Brasenose College, Oxford University.
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Left the Reform Club in London on September 25 1988 for a journey Around the World in 80 Days (1989), accompanied by a BBC TV team.
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Children: Thomas (b. 1969), William (b. 1971) and Rachel (b. 1975)
He is a graduate of Oxford with a degree in History.
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He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2000 Queen's Millennium Honors List for his services to television drama and travel documentaries.