Connie Booth

Connie Booth (born December 2, 1940) is a retired American actress and writer. She has appeared in several British television programmes and films, including her role as Polly Sherman on BBC Two's Fawlty Towers, which she co-wrote with her then-husband John Cleese. In 1995, she left acting and worked as a psychotherapist until her retirement.

Early life

Booth was born Constance Booth Bollinger in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 2, 1940. Her father Elmer Edward Bollinger was a Wall Street stockbroker and her mother Virginia Caylor Bollinger was an actress. The family, which included Connie's elder brother Conrad Booth Bollinger, later moved to New York State. Booth entered acting and worked as a Broadway understudy and waitress. She met John Cleese while he was working in New York City; they married on February 20, 1968.

Acting career

Booth appeared in How to Irritate People (1968), a pre–Monty Python film starring Cleese and other future Python members; she went on to secure parts in episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–74) and in the Python films And Now for Something Completely Different (1971) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, as a woman accused of being a witch). She starred in a German episode of Monty Python, playing the princess, and appeared in a short film entitled Romance with a Double Bass (1974), which Cleese adapted from a short story by Anton Chekhov; and The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It (1977), Cleese's Sherlock Holmes spoof, as Mrs. Hudson.

Booth and Cleese co-wrote and co-starred in Fawlty Towers (1975 and 1979), in which she played art student and chambermaid Polly. For thirty years, Booth declined to talk about the show until she agreed to participate in a documentary about the series for the digital channel Gold in 2009.

Booth played many other roles on British television, including Sophie in Dickens of London (1976), Mrs. Errol in a BBC adaptation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1980), and Miss March in a dramatisation of Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers (1995). She also starred in the lead role of a drama called The Story of Ruth (1981), in which she played the role of the schizophrenic daughter of an abusive father. In 1994, she played a supporting role in "The Culex Experiment", an episode of the children's science fiction TV series The Tomorrow People.

Booth also had a stage career, primarily in the London theatre, appearing in ten productions from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, including starring with John Mills in the 1983–1984 West End production of Little Lies at Wyndham's Theatre.

Psychotherapy career

Booth ended her acting career in 1995. After studying for five years at the University of London, she began a career as a psychotherapist, registered with the British Psychoanalytic Council.

Personal life

In 1971, Booth and Cleese had a daughter, Cynthia. Booth and Cleese divorced in 1978 before the second series of Fawlty Towers was finished and aired.

Booth married John Lahr, author and former New Yorker senior drama critic, in 2000.

Selected filmography and theatrical appearances

Television

Film

Theatre

Notes

External links

• at the British Film Institute
• atIMDb