John Cleese hits back at Miriam Margolyes as she re-ignites feud: ‘It wounded me terribly’
John Cleese has fired back at Miriam Margolyes on social media after footage of her discussing their decades-old Cambridge feud resurfaced online on Wednesday evening.
The Monty Python star posted his own account of events on X the following morning, describing himself and his fellow performers as “rather repressed and socially unskilled lower middle class boys” who “had literally never met someone so brash and vulgar.”
“I’m afraid we shrank away from her,” he wrote. “No abuse or anything. We just kept out of her way.”
The exchange centres on the pair’s time together in the 1962 Cambridge Footlights revue, Double Take, directed by Trevor Nunn, an experience that has fuelled a bitter back-and-forth between the two performers spanning more than six decades.
John Cleese hit back at Miriam Margolyes
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GB NEWSMs Margolyes laid out her grievances during an appearance on The Romesh Ranganathan Show, recounting how Mr Cleese and Graham Chapman were “particularly venomous” towards her during the production.
“The thing that they did that was the most hurtful was that they stopped speaking to me off-stage,” she told the presenter.
“It’s called ‘being sent to Coventry.’ And that’s what they did. And it wounded me terribly.”
She also revealed she was left off the guest list for the cast party, though she protested and ultimately attended.
Miriam Margolyes has been candid about her feud with John Cleese
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GETTYThe actress acknowledged that both men possessed considerable talent but argued they were lacking in basic humanity. “Their comedy was soulless, ultimately,” she said.
Her parting shot drew laughter from the studio: “And I’m glad he’s old and unfunny.”
This latest clash is merely the most recent chapter in a dispute Ms Margolyes has aired repeatedly over the years.
In her 2021 memoir, This Much Is True, she described Mr Cleese, Mr Chapman and Bill Oddie as “total s***s” who never apologised, labelling their conduct “pointed and vicious.”
Miriam Margolyes recalls why she never forgave John Cleese and Graham Chapman
“Women weren’t allowed to join Footlights in the days when I was there.”
“They stopped speaking to me off stage, so that is called being sent to Coventry.”
“It wounded me terribly. And I wasn’t… pic.twitter.com/Ol567zLbxw
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By 2022, she had named Mr Cleese as one of two people she would never want to work with again.
A year later, she sharpened her rhetoric further: “John was a brilliant comedian in his day, but something has turned. Like milk, he’s gone sour. He’s an irrelevance.”
More recently still, speaking on The Life of Bryony podcast, Ms Margolyes called the Fawlty Towers creator “a bitter old man.”
“I should let it go, but I remember the pain,” she said.
The resurgence of the feud comes in the wake of Bill Oddie’s death on July 27 at the age of 85, after what his close friend Eric Idle described as having been “sick for some time.”
John Cleese hit back at Miriam’s claims
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GETTY
Mr Oddie was laid to rest at Hampstead Heath on Monday, August 24.
Photographs from the service showed his ashes being carried on a wooden structure by mourners wearing badger masks, while plastic birds hung from surrounding trees and the crowd rose to their feet in tribute.
Ms Cleese used his response to defend the late comedian-turned-ornithologist’s reputation, pointing out that Ms Margolyes had wrongly included Mr Oddie among those she blamed.
“Not fair. He wasn’t in the show that year, 1962 I think it was,” he wrote. “64 years ago. How time flies.”
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