Comedian John Cleese owes a lot to the animal kingdom after building a career around the surreal Monty Python and achieving mainstream movie success with A Fish Called Wanda — now he’s decided to return the favour.
The lanky Briton said on Friday that he had become a passionate supporter of zoological gardens in recent years and wanted to help their conservation work.
Cleese (66) will perform a fundraiser for Sydney’s Taronga Zoo this weekend. He has staged similar shows in the past for Britain’s Jersey Zoo and is a director of the Santa Barbara Zoo in California, near his United States ranch.
He said his interest had been heightened because we were living ”at a time when the richest people I have ever seen in my life in America are only interested in becoming richer and spoiling the planet in the process”.
”I’m very, very keen to help publicise and maybe raise funds here and there for zoos because I think giving everyone that experience, particularly children, is a chance to order our priorities right,” the Fawlty Towers star told reporters.
Cleese’s ecological endeavours have already resulted in an unexpected honour — he had a species of lemur named after him late last year after it was discovered in Madagascar.
He described ”Cleese’s woolly lemur” — latin name avahi cleesei — as ”small and not terribly interesting”.
”I haven’t seen this little creature yet, I just got a request a few months ago and I said ‘Yes, I’d love it if you could name it after me’ then I was told to shut up about it until it was announced in some major zoological magazine.”
Cleese, who played a lemur-loving zookeeper in the 1997 film Fierce Creatures and hosted a documentary on the diminutive primates a year later, said having a species named after his was more appealing than a recent offer of a lordship.
”I turned down a peerage but I accepted the lemur because I though that was a real distinction,” he said. ”Because now in Britain they’ve built special jails to which they send discredited lords and peers,” he deadpanned.
Posing with a number of Taronga’s exhibits, including a giant carpet python named Sebastian and a hairy spider almost as big as the palm of his hand, Cleese said contact with animals was essential.
”With the population so great and growing all the time and everyone really having an urban existence now, I think we’re really losing contact with our roots,” he said.
”Although it’s wonderful seeing this stuff on television, there’s no comparable experience to being close to an animal, living it and breathing it for a few moments.
”The more we do that, the more we can get our priorities right and see how important it is to conserve these magnificent creatures, many of whom are now thoroughly endangered.” – AFP
