John Sessions

John Marshall (11 January 1953 – 2 November 2020), better known by the stage name John Sessions, was a British actor and comedian. He was known for comedy improvisation in television shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway?, as a panellist on QI, and as a character actor in numerous films, both in the UK and Hollywood. Early life John Sessions was born John Marshall on 11 January 1953 in Bedford, Bedfordshire, despite most sources citing his birth in Largs, Ayrshire, Scotland. His father was a gas engineer. He had an older brother, Bill, and a twin sister, Maggie. Education Sessions was educated at Bedford Modern School, an independent school for boys (now co-educational), and Verulam School, St Albans, followed by the University College of North Wales in Bangor, from which he graduated with an MA in English literature. At university, he had begun to appear to audiences with his comedy in shows such as "Look back in Bangor" and "Marshall Arts". He later studied for a PhD on John Cowper Powys at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, although he did not complete the doctorate. This period in his life was unhappy. In a "Worst of Times" column for The Independent from around 1990, he talked of how the freezing Canadian weather had depressed him, he was smoking "far too many cigarettes" and "had a couple of disastrous flings", and described his PhD dissertation as "200 pages of rubbish".