Connie Booth

American actress who appeared in several British television programmes and films, including her role as Polly Sherman on BBC Two's Fawlty Towers (1975 and 1979), which she co-wrote with her then-husband John Cleese. In 1995, she quit acting and worked as a psychotherapist until her retirement.

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 20 February 1968.

In England, Booth secured parts in episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974) 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 also appeared in How to Irritate People (1968), a pre-Monty Python film starring Cleese and other future Monty Python members.

Booth played various 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 10 productions from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s, notably starring with John Mills in the 1983–1984 West End production of Little Lies at Wyndham's Theatre.

In 1971, Booth and Cleese had a daughter, Cynthia, who appeared alongside her father in the films A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures.