Comedian and actor known for Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Stella Street and Spitting Image
The comedian, mimic and actor John Sessions, who has died of a heart attack aged 67, had trouble being John Sessions. “The hardest part you’ll ever play, honey, is yourself,” he told an interviewer in 1994. Instead, he transformed himself into other people. His breakthrough 1987 one-man West End stage show, The Life of Napoleon, for instance, was described thus by one critic: “In the course of a few sentences Sessions is liable to change voices from Olivier to Lofty of EastEnders, include a pun and a simile, refer to Picasso and Faulkner and move from the battle of Jena to a golf course. It is exhausting, exhilarating and mostly very funny.”
Sessions made his name on TV in the comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1988-91), in which contestants (other regulars included Stephen Fry and Josie Lawrence) would improvise sketches suggested by the studio audience. He was in his element, imagining how James Joyce would spend a day at the beach, or how Hemingway might behave at the dentist. When the contestants were asked to impersonate the person they would least like to be trapped with in a lift, Paul Merton said: “Hello, my name is John Sessions.”
