Christopher Guest

For the Law Lord, see Christopher Guest, Baron Guest.

The Right Honourable The Lord Haden-Guest
At the Vancouver Film School, 2008
Member of the House of Lords as Baron Haden-Guest
In office 8 April 1996 – 11 November 1999
Personal details
Born	Christopher Haden-Guest (1948-02-05) February 5, 1948 New York City, New York, U.S.
Citizenship	United States United Kingdom
Nationality	British-American
Spouse	Jamie Lee Curtis (1984–present)
Relations	Nicholas Guest (brother) Anthony Haden-Guest (half-brother) Tony Curtis (father-in-law), Janet Leigh (mother-in-law), Kelly Curtis (sister-in-law)
Children	2
Residence(s)	Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Education	The High School of Music & Art
Alma mater	New York University
Occupation	Actor, comedian, director, screenwriter, musician

Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest (born February 5, 1948), better known as Christopher Guest, is an English-American screenwriter, composer, musician, director, actor, and comedian who holds dual British and American citizenship. He is most widely known in Hollywood for having written, directed and starred in a series of comedy films shot in mock-documentary (mockumentary) style. Scenes and character backgrounds are written, but actors have no rehearsal time and the ensemble improvise scenes while filming them. This series of films began with This Is Spinal Tap (directed by Rob Reiner), and continued with Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration; and Mascots. Guest also had a featured role as the evil six-fingered Count Rugen in the film The Princess Bride.

He holds a hereditary British peerage as the 5th Baron Haden-Guest, and has publicly expressed a desire to see the House of Lords reformed as a democratically elected chamber. Though he was initially active in the Lords, his career there was cut short by the House of Lords Act 1999, which removed the right of most hereditary peers to a seat in the parliament. When using his title, he is normally styled as Lord Haden-Guest. Guest is married to the actress and author Jamie Lee Curtis.

Early years

Guest was born in New York City, the son of Peter Haden-Guest, a British United Nations diplomat who later became the 4th Baron Haden-Guest, and his second wife, Jean Pauline Hindes, an American former vice president of casting at CBS. Guest's paternal grandfather, Leslie, Baron Haden-Guest, was a Labour Party politician who was a convert to Judaism. Guest's paternal grandmother, a descendant of the Dutch Jewish Goldsmid family, was the daughter of Colonel Albert Goldsmid, a British officer who founded the Jewish Lads' and Girls' Brigade and the Maccabaeans. Guest's maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Both of Guest's parents had become atheists, and Guest had no religious upbringing. Nearly a decade before he was born, his uncle, David Guest, a lecturer and Communist Party member, was killed in the Spanish Civil War, fighting in the International Brigades.

Guest spent parts of his childhood in his father's native United Kingdom. He attended The High School of Music & Art (New York City), studying classical music (clarinet) at the Stockbridge School in Interlaken, Massachusetts. He later took up the mandolin, became interested in country music, and played guitar with Arlo Guthrie, a fellow student at Stockbridge School. Guest later began performing with bluegrass bands until he took up rock and roll.

Guest studied acting at New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1971.

Career

1970s

Guest began his career in theatre during the early 1970s with one of his earliest professional performances being the role of Norman in Michael Weller's Moonchildren for the play's American premiere at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. in November 1971. Guest continued with the production when it moved to Broadway in 1972. The following year he began making contributions to The National Lampoon Radio Hour for a variety of National Lampoon audio recordings. He both performed comic characters (Flash Bazbo—Space Explorer, Mr. Rogers, music critic Roger de Swans, and sleazy record company rep Ron Fields) and wrote, arranged and performed numerous musical parodies (of Bob Dylan, James Taylor and others). He was featured alongside Chevy Chase and John Belushi in the Off-Broadway revue National Lampoon's Lemmings. Two of his earliest film roles were small parts as uniformed police officers in the 1972 film The Hot Rock and 1974's Death Wish.

Guest played a small role in the 1977 All In the Family episode "Mike and Gloria Meet", where in a flashback sequence Mike and Gloria recall their first blind date, set up by Michael's college buddy Jim (Guest), who dated Gloria's girlfriend Debbie (Priscilla Lopez).

1980s

Guest's biggest role of the first two decades of his career is likely that of Nigel Tufnel in the 1984 Rob Reiner film This Is Spinal Tap. Guest made his first appearance as Tufnel on the 1978 sketch comedy program The TV Show.

Along with Martin Short, Billy Crystal and Harry Shearer, Guest was hired as a one-year only cast member for the 1984–85 season on NBC's Saturday Night Live. Recurring characters on SNL played by Guest include Frankie, of Willie and Frankie (coworkers who recount in detail physically painful situations in which they have found themselves, remarking laconically "I hate when that happens"); Herb Minkman, a shady novelty toymaker with a brother named Al (played by Crystal); Rajeev Vindaloo, an eccentric foreign man in the same vein as Andy Kaufman's Latka character from Taxi; and Señor Cosa, a Spanish ventriloquist often seen on the recurring spoof of The Joe Franklin Show. He also experimented behind the camera with pre-filmed sketches, notably directing a documentary-style short starring Shearer and Short as synchronized swimmers. In another short film from SNL, Guest and Crystal appear as retired Negro league baseball players, "The Rooster and the King".

He appeared as Count Rugen in The Princess Bride. He had a cameo role as the first customer, a pedestrian, in the 1986 musical remake of The Little Shop of Horrors, that also featured Steve Martin. As a co-writer and director, Guest made the Hollywood satire The Big Picture.

Upon his father succeeding to the family peerage in 1987, he was known as The Hon. Christopher Haden-Guest. This was his official style and name until he inherited the barony in 1996.

1990–present

The experience of having made Spinal Tap would directly inform the second phase of his career. Starting in 1996, Guest began writing, directing and acting in his own series of substantially improvised films. Many of them would come to be definitive examples of what came to be known as "mockumentaries"-- not a term Guest appreciates in describing his unusual approach to exploring the passions that make the characters in his films so interesting. He maintains that his intention is not to mock anyone, but to explore insular, perhaps obscure communities through his method of filmmaking.

His frequent writing partner is Eugene Levy. Together, Levy, Guest and a small band of other actors have formed a loose repertory group, which appear across several films. These include Catherine O'Hara, Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch, John Michael Higgins, Harry Shearer, Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Begley, Jr. and Fred Willard. Guest and Levy write backgrounds for each of the characters and notecards for each specific scene, outlining the plot, and then leave it up to the actors to improvise the dialogue, which is supposed to result in a much more natural conversation than scripted dialogue would. Typically, everyone who appears in these movies receives the same fee and the same portion of profits.

Guest had a guest voice-over role in the animated comedy series SpongeBob SquarePants as SpongeBob's cousin, Stanley.

Guest appeared as Dr. Stone in A Few Good Men (1992), as Lord Cromer in Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and in the 2009 comedy The Invention of Lying.

He is also currently a member of the musical group The Beyman Bros, which he formed with childhood friend David Nichtern and Spinal Tap's current keyboardist C. J. Vanston. Their debut album Memories of Summer as a Child was released on January 20, 2009.

In 2010, the United States Census Bureau paid $2.5 million to have a television commercial directed by Guest shown during television coverage of Super Bowl XLIV.

Guest holds an honorary doctorate from and is a member of the board of trustees for Berklee College of Music in Boston.

He was most recently the writer and producer of the HBO series, Family Tree, a lighthearted story in the style he made famous in Spinal Tap, in which the main character, Tom Chadwick, inherits a box of curios from his great aunt, spurring interest in his ancestry.

On August 11, 2015, Netflix announced that Mascots, a film about the competition for the World Mascot Association championships's Gold Fluffy Award, would debut in 2016.

Family

Peerage and heirs

Coat of arms - Baron Haden-Guest, of Saling in the County of Essex

Guest became the 5th Baron Haden-Guest, of Great Saling, in the County of Essex, when his father died in 1996. He succeeded upon the ineligibility of his older half-brother, Anthony Haden-Guest, who was born prior to the marriage of his parents. According to an article in The Guardian, Guest attended the House of Lords regularly until the House of Lords Act 1999 barred most hereditary peers from their seats. In the article Guest remarked:

There's no question that the old system was unfair. I mean, why should you be born to this? But now it's all just sheer cronyism. The Prime Minister can put in whoever he wants and bus them in to vote. The Upper House should be an elected body, it's that simple.

Ancestry

Family of Christopher Guest

8. Dr. Alexander Haden-Guest 4. Leslie Haden-Guest, 1st Baron Haden-Guest 9. Catharine Anna Johnson 2. Peter Albert Michael Haden-Guest, 4th Baron Haden-Guest 10. Col. Albert Edward Williamson Goldsmid 5. Muriel Carmel Goldsmid 11. Ida Stewart Hendriks 1. Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest 12. ????? 6. Dr. Albert George Hindes 13. ????? 3. Jean Pauline Hindes, Baroness Haden-Guest 14. ????? 7. Rose ????? 15. ?????

Personal life

Guest married actress Jamie Lee Curtis in 1984 at the home of their mutual friend, Rob Reiner. They have two adopted children: Anne (born 1986) and Thomas (born 1996). Because Guest's children are adopted, they cannot inherit the family barony under the terms of the letters patent that created it, though a 2004 Royal Warrant addressing the style of a peer's adopted children states that they can use courtesy titles. The current heir presumptive to the barony is Guest's younger brother, actor Nicholas Guest.

Off-stage demeanor

As reported by Louis B. Hobson, "On film, Guest is a hilariously droll comedian. In person he is serious and almost dour." He quotes Guest as saying "People want me to be funny all the time. They think I'm being funny no matter what I say or do and that's not the case. I rarely joke unless I'm in front of a camera. It's not what I am in real life. It's what I do for a living."

Filmography

Year	Title	Credit				Role	Notes
		Actor	Writer	Director	Producer
1971	The Hospital	Yes				Resident	Uncredited
1972	The Hot Rock	Yes				Policeman
1973	National Lampoon Lemmings	Yes	Yes				Musical arranger
1974	Death Wish	Yes				Patrolman Jackson Reilly
1975	The Fortune	Yes				Boy Lover
	Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle	Yes				Chief M'Bulu / Short / Nurse	Voice only
1976	The Billion Dollar Bubble	Yes					TV film
1977	It Happened One Christmas	Yes				Harry Bailey	TV film
	The Andros Targets	Yes				Gordon Hamilton	Episode: "A Currency for Murder"
	All in the Family	Yes				Jim	Episode: "Mike and Gloria Meet"
1978	Laverne & Shirley	Yes				Greg Harris	Episode: "Bus Stop"
	Peeping Times		Yes				Television special
	Girlfriends	Yes				Eric
1979	The Last Word	Yes				Roger
1980	Haywire	Yes				The T.V. Director	Television film
	The Long Riders	Yes				Charley Ford
	The Missing Link	Yes				No Lobes	English version; voice
1981	Heartbeeps	Yes				Calvin
1982	Million Dollar Infield	Yes				Bucky Frische	Television film
	A Piano for Mrs. Cimino	Yes				Philip Ryan	Television film
	St. Elsewhere	Yes				H.J. Cummings	2 episodes
1984	This Is Spinal Tap	Yes	Yes			Nigel Tufnel	Composer, musician
1984–85	Saturday Night Live	Yes	Yes			Various	19 episodes
1985	Martin Short: Concert for the North Americas	Yes				Rajiv Vindaloo
1986	Little Shop of Horrors	Yes				The First Customer
	Tall Tales & Legends		Yes				Episode: "Johnny Appleseed"
1987	Beyond Therapy	Yes				Bob
	The Princess Bride	Yes				Count Tyrone Rugen, the six-fingered man
1988	Sticky Fingers	Yes				Sam
1989	The Big Picture		Yes	Yes
	Billy Crystal: Midnight Train to Moscow	Yes				The Voice	Stand-up special
	Trying Times			Yes			Episode: "The Sad Professor"
	I, Martin Short, Goes Hollywood	Yes				Antoninus DiMentabella
1991	Morton & Hayes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	El Supremo / Crooner / Dr. Von Astor	3 episodes; composed theme music
	Amnesty International's Big 3-0	Yes				Nigel Tufnel	Television special
1992	The Simpsons	Yes				Nigel Tufnel	Episode: "The Otto Show" Voice
	A Few Good Men	Yes				Dr. Stone
1993	Animaniacs	Yes				Umlatt	Episode: "King Yakko" Voice
	Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman			Yes			Television film; composer
1994	The Return of Spinal Tap	Yes				Nigel Tufnel
1997	Waiting for Guffman	Yes	Yes	Yes		Corky St. Clair
1998	Almost Heroes			Yes
	Small Soldiers	Yes				Slamfist/Scratch-It	Voice
1999	Dilbert	Yes				The Dupey	Episode: "The Dupey" Voice
2000	Best in Show	Yes	Yes	Yes		Harlan Pepper
2003	A Mighty Wind	Yes	Yes	Yes		Alan Barrows
	MADtv	Yes				Nigel Tufnel	Episode: season 8, episode 21
2005	Mrs Henderson Presents	Yes				Lord Cromer
2006	For Your Consideration	Yes	Yes	Yes		Jay Berman
2007	SpongeBob SquarePants	Yes				Stanley S. SquarePants	Episode: "Banned in Bikini Bottom / Stanley S. SquarePants" Voice
2009	Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian	Yes				Ivan the Terrible
	The Invention of Lying	Yes				Nathan Goldfrappe
	Stonehenge: 'Tis a Magic Place	Yes				Nigel Tufnel	3 episodes
2012	Her Master's Voice				Yes
	84th Academy Awards	Yes		Yes		Focus Group Member	Directed focus group segment
2013	Family Tree	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Dave Chadwick / Phineas Chadwick	8 episodes; also co-creator composed credits theme
2016	Mascots	Yes	Yes	Yes		Corky St. Clair	Netflix film

Recurring cast members

Actor	This Is Spinal Tap (1984)	The Big Picture (1989)	Waiting for Guffman (1997)	Almost Heroes (1998)	Best in Show (2000)	A Mighty Wind (2003)	For Your Consideration (2006)	Family Tree (2013)	Mascots (2016)
Bob Balaban
Ed Begley, Jr.
Jennifer Coolidge
John Michael Higgins
Michael Hitchcock
Don Lake
Eugene Levy
Jane Lynch
Michael McKean
Larry Miller
Chris O'Dowd
Catherine O'Hara
Jim Piddock
Parker Posey
Harry Shearer
Fred Willard

Titles and styles

• 5 February 1948 – 26 May 1987: Mister Christopher Haden-Guest
• 26 May 1987 – 8 April 1996: The Honourable Christopher Haden-Guest
• 8 April 1996 – present: The Right Honourable The Lord Haden-Guest

Awards and nominations

Year	Award	Category	Film	Result
1976	Primetime Emmy Award	Outstanding Writing in a Comedy-Variety or Music Special Ann Elder Shared with Earl Pomerantz, Jim Rusk, Lily Tomlin, Rod Warren, George Yanok	The Lily Tomlin Special	Won
1995	International Fantasy Film Award	Best Film	Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1993 film)	Nominated
1998	Independent Spirit Award	Best Male Lead	Waiting for Guffman	Nominated
		Best Screenplay Shared with Eugene Levy		Nominated
	Lone Star Film & Television Award	Best Director		Won
2001	DVD Exclusive Award	Best DVD Audio Commentary	This Is Spinal Tap	Won
	American Comedy Award	Funniest Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture	Best in Show	Nominated
	Golden Satellite Award	Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical		Nominated
	Independent Spirit Award	Best Director		Nominated
	Writers Guild of America Award	Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen Shared with Eugene Levy		Nominated
2003	Seattle Film Critics Award	Best Music Shared with John Michael Higgins, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Catherine O'Hara, Annette O'Toole, Harry Shearer, Jeffrey C. J. Vanston	A Mighty Wind	Won

External links

• Christopher Guest at IMDb
• Christopher Guest at the Internet Broadway Database
• Christoper Guest bio in The Peerage
• "Nowt so queer as folk". The Guardian (UK). January 10, 2004. Richard Grant. Interview for release of A Mighty Wind.