There’s a fittingly dark footnote in the history of the classic 1988 comedy A Fish Called Wanda: the movie killed someone.

In 1989, Dr. Ole Bentzen, a 56-year-old Danish audiologist reportedly in good health, laughed himself to death while watching the film.

"I was shocked to hear him break out laughing like that," Dr. Bentzen’s medical assistant Einer Randel told Danish medical journal Medicine Today after the incident. "The next thing I knew, he was dead."

The film itself is a love story, an exquisitely constructed farce, a crime caper, and a dissertation on the differences between Americans and the British, all at once. Its intricate plot, which revolves around a crew of criminals crossing and double-crossing each other following a diamond heist, involves copious layers of deceit, the unintended assassination of three Yorkshire terriers, one character flattened by a steamroller into wet cement, and likely the most absurd love scene in cinematic history.

A Fish Called Wanda was written, meticulously and over many years, by John Cleese, who also starred as British barrister Archie Leach, repressed to the point of rigor mortis, and directed by Charles Crichton, who turned 77 in the middle of filming.

Roger Ebert, in his delighted review, wrote admiringly of the film’s mean-spiritedness. Behind the scenes, though, there was a unique spirit of collaboration between Cleese and his co-stars: fellow Monty Python alum Michael Palin as stammering animal-lover Ken, Jamie Lee Curtis as the beguilingly manipulative Wanda, and Kevin Kline in an Academy Award–winning performance as the flexuous, Nietzsche-reading, alleged former C.I.A. agent Otto.

Ahead of the film’s 30th anniversary, Cleese, Palin, Curtis, and Kline spoke to Vanity Fair—from Bergen, Norway, London, Los Angeles and New York, respectively—about A Fish Called Wanda, sex, violence, nudity, seafood, and dying of laughter.

June 1983: Cleese and veteran director Crichton, who have fully intended to make a movie together since the late 60s, sit by a hotel pool in France. They begin developing the story of A Fish Called Wanda. Cleese’s one idea is a character with a stutter having to impart some important information; Crichton wishes for a scene in which a character is run over by a steamroller.

Cleese goes off to work on the script, his first feature-film script as a solo writer.

Michael Palin: John had done Fawlty Towers, which of course had been almost unsurpassable. Others of us [members of Monty Python] had been making films. Terry Gilliam had made Time Bandits, Jabberwocky, Brazil. Eric [Idle] had made some films. I think John had felt the time had come to make a full-length film. In his rather typically careful and patient way, he took several years in the planning of it.

John Cleese: The ideas came slowly. I did 13 drafts altogether: 8 minor drafts and 5 major drafts. I would do a draft which was about trying to get character right, then another draft which was about trying to make the plot make perfectly good sense.

I remember going to a strange war-games shop and buying little characters, so that, for some of the farce sequences, I would draw the set and move the characters around—see who exactly was in what room at what moment. I loved [the writing process]. Yes, a bit like solving a crossword, but much more fun—because sometimes I would make myself laugh, you know.

1983-1985: The script gradually comes together—and the stars align, with Cleese carefully tailoring parts for himself and three others. Cleese sees Kline in Sophie’s Choice and later meets him inSydney, Australia, during the international promotional tour for the movie; the two shared a condominium while filming the 1985 Lawrence Kasdan film Silverado. Cleese sees Curtis for the first time in the 1983 film Trading Places. Cleese and Palin—scene partners in the iconic "Dead Parrot," "Cheese Shop," and "Argument Clinic" Python sketches, among others—had most recently worked together on Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in 1983.

Palin: It’s a great pleasure to work with John. You can go anywhere with him, and he’ll never let you down. And there’s always a bit of fencing going on between our characters in Python.

Cleese: It’s an odd analogy, but I always think of—back in the days my legs were working properly and I could play games, you sometimes find someone to play tennis or squash with who was your perfect partner across the net. We would always have tight games. It felt like that with Michael. Not that it was competitive. But we were a very good balance; we were perfectly matched, and I always thought the scenes with Michael were the best ones.

Kevin Kline: Soon after I moved to New York, I saw the film Python did, And Now for Something Completely Different, a compilation they made of some of their best sketches. I had that feeling one gets when you see a comedian, or an actor, whatever, that this person is speaking to me directly—that feeling of ownership, in a way, and discovery. When it came on television on PBS, I watched it religiously. It was on every Sunday night. I remember thinking, Oh, this is my Sunday worship.

John and I shared a condominium while we were on location. He was there for rehearsals, and I remember him commenting on what a clown I was. And that’s when he first mentioned possibly writing something for me.

Cleese: My older daughter Cynthia wanted me to take her to a movie, and I took her to Trading Places. And suddenly this extraordinary new actress came on-screen.

Jamie Lee Curtis: When I heard John Cleese wanted to speak to me, I remember thinking he was mistaken, and that he must have wanted to speak to Chris Guest because This Is Spinal Tap had just come out. [Guest and Curtis married in December 1984.] I thought it’d be, "Hi, Jamie. Put Chris on." That’s really what I imagined.

But I had lunch with him on Sunset. He said, "I’m writing this movie for you, and Michael Palin, and Kevin Kline, and myself. I’d like you to do it. I promise you you’ll have a great time. It’ll be very funny, and it’ll be very successful. I’m sure of it." I remember just sort of being, "O.K., John. Sure." Not really thinking it was real. Then a month later, two months later, we had a phone call . . .

November 7, 1986: the cast gathers at Cleese’s home for the first reading of the script, followed by more writing—focused largely on perfecting Cleese’s own character.

Cleese: We had a read through in ’86, and every one of the characters worked except for Archie. Michael said, "Just take the character down a bit." I was pushing too much, because I wanted Archie to be funny. And I needed to realize that the big laughs are going to come from Kevin and Michael, and the stuff I was doing with Jamie needed to be authentic and quite real.

Two months before shooting, I met Kevin—by arrangement, obviously—and we just went through his scenes.

Kline: We said, "Let’s go somewhere warm." And so we went to Jamaica. Luckily, it rained for 10 days, so we actually got some work done.

We just sort of read my scenes, and I would improvise occasionally on the lines. If a new idea came in, I would blurt that out. I remember once, John was telling me something, which sparked an idea in my head, and I was thinking about that, and then I said, "What was the middle thing you said?"

June 16, 1987: the cast gathers for its first day of rehearsals.

Cleese: Altogether, 13 people made suggestions, which I incorporated into the script. I remember an early read through, about two weeks before we started shooting—at a particular point Jonathan Benson, the lovely first assistant, suggested a line, and I said, "Oh, that’s much better," and wrote it in. I remember Jamie looking so startled. She said that would never happen in Hollywood.

Curtis: We all gave suggestions. That was the beauty of A Fish Called Wanda for me. To be included, to have my ideas be listened to. There was a freedom in sharing that is very unusual.

Kline: John said, right at the beginning, "We’re all going to direct this."

June 24: Otto’s costume is complete.

Kline: John was very specific about the look. He wanted it to be a combination of a fashionista and a man who reads Guns & Ammo. Hazel Pethig, the costumer who’d done all the costumes for Python for years, she and I spent quitea bit of time shopping. She’d gotten one long, vintage, blue Issey Miyake overcoat from a friend.

It wasn’t until the last day of shopping somewhere on Carnaby Street or on Kings Road that we found a hat—that funny, little black hat which didn’t fit, but made my head come to a point. And we came rushing back—look at this hat! We’ve got him! This is the character. The all-important hat.

I was wearing tennis wristbands. And around my ankles—I’m wearing sneakers, but tucking my pants in these terry-cloth sweatbands, so they would look like military boots. It was like the character: just a concoction of nonsense.

July 13: filming commences in London.

Curtis: I gave all of the men toothbrushes and toothpaste on the first day of the movie. Because Wanda basically works her way down the line, if you will. Everybody was like, I’m all for this—but the whole English thing, with tea in the late afternoon and sugar cookies? Yuck.

Let me say this: when you’re an actor, and you are required to engage in intimate contact, you know—it’s real. It’s not fake. And therefore, if you’re going to do it in front of 100 people, 20 times, I’m the person who always goes, "Let’s go in my trailer and make out a little bit." Because we’d better get comfortable with this by ourselves, if, in 15 minutes, we’re full-on macking, as I think they would call it in England.

Kline, whose trailer is filled with costumes and back-exercising equipment, unleashes the full force of Otto.

Kline: I remember the first day after the first take, coming into the apartment, and I grab Jamie, one of her breasts, while what’s-his-name’s not looking. I said to John, "Too much?" And he said, "No! More! Bigger!"

Curtis: It was pretty clear from the beginning that Kevin was on his own wavelength—that he was doing something really quite magical.

Palin, who has acquired curly hair for the film, hones Ken’s stutter.

Palin: My father had a serious and disabling stammer. It was a difficult thing when I was growing up. We never confronted the issue; there seemed to be nothing one can do to deal with a stammer like that. So we just carried on as if it wasn’t happening. But, of course, I observed it for many years.

And that was what I sort of was trying to think about when I played Ken. I wanted it to be an expression of the tensions within the character—one of which, of course, is he loves animals, but he detests human beings.

In the finished film, the scene in which Otto ferociously humps Wanda is set to a Wagnerian music cue written by composer John Du Prez, complete with triumphant brass blasts when Otto blows into Wanda’s boots. The scene culminates with Otto’s cross-eyed orgasm.

Kline: I remember it as though it were earlier today. Originally, the scene we had conceived was Otto in a gym, lifting barbells, sitting on one of those benches that one has, and while he’s working on his latissimus dorsi or whatever, Wanda mounts him. But we didn’t have time to assemble all that, so they said, "Let’s just do it in bed."

I remember working up to that lovemaking sequence, blowing up her boot, ripping her bra off. "Le due cupole grandi della cattedrale di Milano." One of my favorite lines. I started doing the different cheeses, but I actually ran out of the menu Italian with which I familiarized myself and started singing "Volare"—it just came from the depths of my unconscious—all the while thinking, I wonder what the rights to this are going to cost us.

We decided that, for the orgasm, he should look like his essential self—you know, a total idiot. During the sublime moment of release, we see him with his true colors: a dumb, animal loony.

I’m surprised any of it made it to the final cut.

Curtis: There was a pillow over my face, and probably a roll of socks in my mouth to stop laughing. Because I know the minute he stops his, er, movement, I know what his face is going to do. And it makes me laugh saying it to you on the phone 30 years later.

I am a very easy laugh. I’m sure Kevin harbors some secret resentment because, you see, I am an untrained little organism. And, therefore, when something really funny happens, I laugh. I had to develop—because of my experience on A Fish Called Wanda—tools to not laugh. Because I ruined a lot of Kevin’s work. If you freeze-frame the scene outside on the wharf, when he says, "Apes don’t read philosophy," I’m already laughing. I feel like I ruined many good takes of his.

Kline: People are always cracking up around me, onstage or on film. But I tend to keep a straight face in those situations. I’m very proud of that, for some reason. I don’t know if I should be. [Laughs] It’s being terribly professional. What a pro, what a pro.

One version of the script included a scene based on something that happened to a friend of Cleese’s, in which Wanda is intruded upon in the nude. In the scene that ended up in the movie, it’s Archie who ends up being rudely interrupted.

Cleese: I had an idea early on, when I was talking to Jamie about the plot and the way I was going to develop it, and I had a scene where she was caught naked. She said, "You know, I’ve done several of these. I’d rather not." She said, "Why don’t you write a scene where you’re the one who’s naked?" I thought, That’s really good.

Curtis: Naturally, it wasn’t his plan, kiddo. Naturally.

My feeling about any nudity in movies, period, is it rarely isn’t a distraction. It is our nature to look. And I think it takes you out of the moment. So I said to John, "If I’m naked, people are going to stop watching the movie." They’re going to stop laughing, and they’re going to be just checking me out naked. And me naked looks pretty good. And I just knew it would be a distraction.

I said, "What would be funny is if you’re naked." He obviously seemed to think that was a good idea. This guy, who has been freed from, literally, his robes—this freedom that this woman has brought out of him, the sexual liberation, this being in his body and being virile. You know what I mean. All the beauty of the transformation of Archie comes crashing down. It’s fantastic to have that final moment of complete freedom. And then, the air goes out of the balloon, if you will. You can imagine—not that we see it—him in his full regalia, to being deflated. And then, of course, he grabs the woman’s picture and covers the deflation with her face.

Curtis expertly guides Cleese through Archie and Wanda’s romantic scenes. Cleese surprises himself by getting teary during the filming of an emotional scene, but then hits his head on a bit of foam, rendering the take unusable.

Palin: It was rather a different John from Python, where he’d always been playing the rather forceful, central, towering figure. He played wistfulness and doubt and wonder and delight very convincingly. I think there must have been something there that he was rather glad to do. Maybe he should have done it earlier.

Cleese: When we got to the romantic scenes, Jamie said, "I’ve done these scenes, and you haven’t. I get to be in charge now."

She said, "We’re hardly going to rehearse." And that frightened the shit out of me, because I’m a compulsive rehearser. It was a bit scary to start with, but it was also very nice to create something in the moment without necessarily calculating it.

Even somebody like myself becomes typecast after a time. Very many people have asked me if I’m like Basil Fawlty in real life. Nobody has ever asked me if I’m like Archie Leach in real life.

Curtis: As I mentioned, I’m an untrained performer. John is this highly educated, intellectual, über-intellectual, too intellectual, very brilliant guy. With the tiniest writing you’ve ever seen in your life. Ask John to write for you. It’s insane how tiny his writing is.

But I guess I don’t think he ever really looked at someone before, like really. I said, "Let’s just be in the moment here. Let’s just look at each other a little bit."

And he definitely enjoyed it. You could see him just melt. And I felt it, and I know it came across on-screen—I’ve seen it. I don’t have to take credit for this; he was fantastic and a great partner.

Early on, Palin notes in his diary that performing alongside Kline was akin to being "the magician’s assistant." But though Kline is thrillingly spontaneous on set, he’s plagued by uncertainty and self-doubt throughout the shoot.

Cleese: Kevin was doing some extraordinary things. But at the end of every take, he’d always stand there, the epitome of indecision, trying to figure out whether he’d got the character right. I don’t think he ever did a take he was really happy with. There was always sort of a querulous, doubtful expression on his face. He would stand there agonizing. And you just got used to it after a time.

Kline: I never understood the character. I kept saying, "Who is this guy?" John actually had a T-shirt printed that said, "Who is this guy?" Because he was such an amalgam of contradictions. He seemed to be a buffoon and idiot, but he’s a good shot and he’s got some physical strength.

But I learned something from it: that, actually, not understanding the character is sort of all right. I realized it was a tribute to John’s writing. Because well-written characters are inconsistent, are contradictory, and trying to reconcile the contradictions is maybe a fool’s errand at the end of the day.

Palin: I think Kevin’s performance really gave the film its energy. The violent aggression of the performance is very well controlled, the sort of thing that John did as Basil Fawlty.

You just have to keep up with it, really. The scene on the stairs where he asks if he can he kiss me, something about the way I dress, was entirely improvised. It’s a high-wire act, and you have to be careful as you go along with it. Sometimes you don’t necessarily want to go to 12 or 15 takes, but he was terrific to work with.

Curtis: I think Michael and I were fairly aligned in the way we work—we kinda just show up and do it. John is a little more studied, given his tiny writing.

Kevin is an inventor. And I would say he’s like a magician—and, therefore, if you’re in a scene with him, basically, when he is doing his trick, you’d better be standing there with the rabbit. Or whatever the fuck magicians’ assistants do. Because that’s where the magic is happening. He was painstaking, to the point of being difficult, with every aspect of it.

In the film’s traumatizingly memorable torture scene, Otto inserts a pear in Ken’s mouth and fries up his nostrils—or "chips," in British parlance—before proceeding to devour his pet fish, including his beloved Wanda.

Palin: A lot of people think it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. Well, they should try it.

Kevin picked up the pear and stuck it in my mouth—that wasn’t in the script, I don’t think. And the chips up the nose. The combination was almost suffocation. I wasn’t able to take in a great deal of air.

They were specially created chips that would not bend when they went up your nose. But then, not to go into too fine detail, these silicon chips would slip out as I was doing the scene. So it was a great effort of nasal retention required to hold those chips up my nose.

If anyone else in a restaurant asks me one more time if I would like some French fries up my nose, I’ll put a potato up theirs. It was very difficult to do.

Kline: I remember thinking, Oh, these brilliant British property people will come up with some animatronic [fish], some wriggly thing that disappears when you put it in your mouth or something. And then I got there, and they say, "Can you wriggle this rubber thing when you hold it, and make it look like it’s alive?" I thought, This is rather primitive. Basically, they were little painted rubbery things. And by the end of the day, I would say, "Can I just have a real fish? These taste awful."

Late 1987 to early 1988: the film is screened for test audiences, who disapprove of several key moments of cruelty: the torture of Ken, the splattered innards of two squashed terriers, and especially the original ending, which implies Wanda’s ultimate deception of Archie. Cleese gets valuable advice on the film from the likes of Rob Reiner, Harold Ramis, Steve Martin, and Lawrence Kasdan.

Cleese: I think we altogether had 13 screenings after the re-shoots, and edited the film 12 times. Steve Martin gave me the most expert set of notes on a movie that I’ve ever had from anyone. Ultimately, the audience tells you what works.

The torture scene, I thought, was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. And yet when we showed it to audiences, there was a squeamishness we couldn’t understand. At some point, we had someone with a tape recorder go in so we could listen during the scene. And there were a lot of "eurghhh" sounds. They were worried that Michael couldn’t breathe. They just didn’t think it was as funny as we did. Our judgment simply had to be sacrificed.

The final shot we had, Jamie had actually found an extraordinary pair of shoes that looked like sharks. We were going to see Archie and Wanda embracing, and then pan down and show the shark.

Curtis: Those were shoes that Hazel Pethig and I bought specifically to wear in that last scene. It was my suggestion that they pan down my legs and end the movie on my shark shoe, which was going to let you know that Wanda was playing Archie like a violin—that Archie, with all his romantic delusion, was going to get clobbered on the head, and she was going to take off with the money.

And then what happened is we showed the movie to audiences, and they loved the movie, hated the ending. The relationship between Archie and Wanda was so real, and people were rooting for them.

Early 1988: More edits, and re-shoots in London. One visibly and gruesomely squashed dog is replaced by a cartoonish "raffia mat" version. Particular attention is paid to warming up the romance between Archie and Wanda. Curtis reluctantly travels away from her 18-month-old daughter for the first time for re-shoots.

Curtis: I did not go happily, and I was a little pissed that the bite was being taken out of the movie. I actually was kind of like, oh please, are we wimping out here? Are we tilting towards this American sentimentality and faux romanticism and all of this bullshit? I loved the sort of truth bite that John had written—a darker, much darker, more sinister ending.

And then we had to go back into the movie, add in a phone call between Wanda and Archie, the scene of us driving in the car, and re-shot the end.

And, well, I’ll tell you right now: it’s hard when a movie’s that successful to say that it was wrong to do it. You do testing for a reason. And the message was loud and clear: they have to be together. And so they were.

A Fish Called Wanda was released in the U.S. on July 15 and in the U.K. on October 14, becoming an instant hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, with Kline winning best supporting actor, and Cleese and Palin winning British Academy Film Awards for best actor and best supporting actor.

In his acceptance speech, Cleese thanks Crichton, Curtis, Kline, and Palin, as well as Eleanor Roosevelt, Søren Kierkegaard, the London Symphony Orchestra brass section, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds, Saint Francis of Assisi, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Mother Teresa, Herb Alpert, Hermann Göring, the publicity department of Turkish Airways, the Unknown Soldier, and "last, but of course not least, God."

In 1989, 20 years after the Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch about a lethally funny joke, a Danish doctor laughs himself to death watching the film.

Palin: That was an extraordinary and dreadful accident. He must have laughed very hard indeed. Quite a tribute.

And yes, everything you write comes round to kick you up the arse later in life. I think Python was actually a series of premonitions which are gradually coming true.

Cleese: Yes, I think it is the ultimate compliment. He started laughing after about 15 minutes in, and literally never stopped. We tried to contact his widow, because we wondered about using this in the publicity. I think we decided it was in too bad taste.

I mean, we all have to go. And I think laughing yourself to death is a nice way to do it.