[BellsOnSunday]

I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, Welsh housewife, upper class patrician, so when you heard him on a chat show actually being "himself" it seemed very weird. He was a notoriously private person so those masks might have been part of that. It worked for him anyway, and he must have made at least as many people laugh as did Cleese.