If John Cleese is the Pope of comedy, John is the Cardinal.
Alison Pope credits School Of Comedy with enhancing her son's self esteem.
He went on to star in a clutch of other films (with Marcello Mastroianni in Tornatore's Everybody's Fine, remade recently for Hollywood with Robert De Niro, and, more bizarrely, Robbie Coltrane, in the Vatican corruption comedy The Pope Must Die) but never quite made a successful transition from child star to adult actor.
Similarly confused is "The Kid Who Would Be Pope," a cute but unsatisfying comedy that plays like an underdeveloped pitch for a Disney movie.
Nineteenth-century composer plus a spaceship, comedy zombie Hitler, Pope Ringo, and a giant penis: it must have sounded so good on paper.
In early 1893, she travelled to Wolverhampton where she starred as Flossie in another unsuccessful piece called The A.B.C Girl; or, Flossie the Frivolous, which, according to MacQueen-Pope, "ended the Queen of Comedy's career as an actress".
Also popular was The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), a crime comedy based on Vincent Patrick's novel set in Little Italy.
On the occasion of the election of a new Pope, Nanni Moretti's blithe yet fierce, Chaplinesque comedy "We Have a Pope," starring Michel Piccoli as the reluctant victor, which was released last spring, is available again on demand on Amazon, iTunes, and elsewhere.
A Communist, a satirist, he aims his sarcasm and slapstick comedy at authority, and in "The Pope and the Witch" he takes dead aim at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church.
