Where are the stars of the 1981 Cambridge Footlights now? From an iconic comedy double act to Hollywood royalty, how the late Tony Slattery was a member of world-renowned student society alongside host of famous names

Comedian and actor Tony Slattery, who has died aged 65, showed youthful promise in the acclaimed Cambridge Footlights student society – alongside a host of future household names including Hollywood royalty.

Slattery’s partner of 40 years, Mark Michael Hutchinson, today announced his death at the age of 65 after a heart attack on Sunday evening.

The comic came to fame in the late 1980s and 1990s, for appearances on comedy shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Just A Minute and Have I Got News For You – though in recent years stepped back from the spotlight.

Some of his student contemporaries from Cambridge more than four decades ago remain leading figures across not only British but international showbusiness.

The Cambridge Footlights society, for students interested in and talented at not only acting but especially comedy, has long been seen as a fast track to stardom.

Figures who – like Slattery, in 1982 – have held the prestigious position of Footlights president included Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Sue Perkins and David Mitchell.

Being invited to join the troupe – whose efforts culminate in an end-of-year revue – has helped propel many many more aspiring entertainers to wider attention.

The cohort among whom Slattery performed during his Cambridge days included future Oscar winner Emma Thompson, newly-knighted Stephen Fry and his 1980s comedy partner and Global Globe winner Hugh Laurie. 

Here, as tributes pour in for Slattery, MailOnline takes a look at what became of  the students who starred alongside him…

Pictured left to right at 1981 Cambridge Footlights performers Stephen Fry, Tony Slattery, Emma Thompson, Paul Shearer, Penny Dwyer and Hugh Laurie

Comedian and actor Tony Slattery, seen appearing on ITV’s This Morning show in May 2019, has died at the age of 65 following a heart attack

Stephen Fry (left) and Tony Slattery (right) were fellow performers in the Cambridge Footlights – they are pictured here during filming for ITV comedy drama series Kingdom in 2007

Emma Thompson

The Cambridge Footlights’ 1981 end-of-year revue, co-starring Slattery, was called The Cellar Tapes – and went on to win the first Perrier Award for best comedy at the Edinburgh Festival.

That would be far from the last prizes for those involved – and it did feature among the sketches one in which a pretentious actress named Juliana Talent accepts an award with pompous faux-modesty.

That character was played by Emma Thompson, who has gone on to earn two Oscars – one for Best Actress in 1992, following her performance in the movie adaptation of EM Forster’s novel Howards End.

And four years later she picked up the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, with her version of Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility – making her the only person to win Oscars for both acting and writing.

Thompson, now 65, attended Newnham College in Cambridge before following her Footlights success with appearances in the ITV sketch series Alfresco in 1983 and 1984 – then, in 1984, a West End revival of the musical Me And My Girl.

Many more serious roles have followed, on both stage and screen – while she also added poignancy, as a betrayed wife, to Richard Curtis’s romcom Love Actually, starred in the Nanny McPhee films and featured in three Harry Potter movies.

Thompson, married to fellow actor Greg Wise following a first marriage to Sir Kenneth Branagh, was made a Dame in 2018 for services to drama. 

Emma Thompson, seen in a BBC screening of the Cambridge Footlights Review in February 1982, was among the winners of the first Perrier Award in Edinburgh the previous year

Emma Thompson has gone on to worldwide acclaim for her stage and screen roles, including two Oscars – including this one for Best Actress in 1992

She was made Dame Emma Thompson in 2018 for services to drama

Stephen Fry

One of Tony Slattery’s big screen roles came in the 1992 film Peter’s Friends – which reunited, a decade on, familiar faces and friends from Cambridge Footlights days.

The Peter of the title was played by Stephen Fry, whose character brings back together after 10 years his former fellow Cambridge acting troupe performers.

Not only was Slattery among those taking part, but also their Perrier Award-winning co-stars Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.

By then, all had become TV mainstays – with sketch show A Bit Of Fry & Laurie making its BBC debut in 1989 and going on to run until 1995.

Fry and Laurie also appeared together in various series of classic BBC sitcom Blackadder and Fry, now 67, went on to star as his hero Oscar Wilde in 1997 movie Wilde – for which he received a Golden Globes nomination for Best Actor.

His other credits include hosting BBC2 panel show QI between 2003 and 2016 as well as featuring in films such as Gosford Park, V For Vendetta, and Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland adaptations in which he played the Cheshire Cat.

Fry, who has written 16 books including novels and memoirs and narrated the Harry Potter audiobooks, was awarded a knighthood in the latest New Year’s Honours List. 

Stephen Fry, pictured performing a sketch in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights revue The Cellar Tapes, was credited as one of the show’s main writers alongside Hugh Laurie

A Bit Of Fry & Laurie was among the TV shows in which Hugh Laurie (left) and Stephen Fry (right) teamed up together, as they also did in Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder

Stephen Fry, pictured at a book launch in London last May, has just been awarded a knighthood

Hugh Laurie

Hugh Laurie was the president of the Cambridge Footlights team in 1981 who won that first Perrier Award with their show The Cellar Tapes. 

The prize was presented by Rowan Atkinson, who had impressed five years earlier in an Edinburgh show by the Cambridge Footlights’ Oxford counterparts, the Oxford Revue.

Laurie and Anderson would go on to star together in Blackadder, in which Laurie – who had been introduced to the Footlights by then-girlfriend Emma Thompson – showcased his specialty for depicting ‘upper-class twits’.

He also did so in his other links-ups with Stephen Fry, A Bit Of Fry & Laurie and ITV’s PG Wodehouse adaptations with Laurie as Bertie Wooster and Fry as Jeeves.

He has since demonstrated his versatility, playing a jaded American physician in hit series House – for which he won two of his three Golden Globes – while also releasing two blues and jazz albums on which he plays piano, guitar and organ.

Laurie, married to theatre administrator Jo Green since 1989 and a father of a three children, also published a novel called The Gun Seller in 1996.

His most recent screen projects include 2023 film The Canterville Ghost – alongside Fry, Imelda Staunton and Toby Jones – and TV drama series Tehran.

Hugh Laurie was director of the 1981 Cambridge Footlights revue which won that year’s first Perrier Award for comedy at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

He specialised in upper-class twit characters such as Prince George in Blackadder The Third

Hugh Laurie has also gained success and awards across the Atlantic on shows such as House and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which he promoted on NBC’s Today Show in April 2022

Paul Shearer

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry were listed as main writers of the 1981 Cambridge Footlights show, but there was additional material credited to colleagues including Slattery, Thompson and Paul Shearer, who also performed on stage.

Shearer would later become a familiar regular figure in 1990s hit sketch series The Fast Show, having previously appeared on television on The Russ Abbot Show and Birds Of A Feather among others.

He has also worked as a voiceover artist, corporate video writer and consultant, and also presented podcasts about commercial real estate in his other vocation as a property journalist.

It was revealed last November that his daughter Cal Shearer, a 25-year-old PhD student at Oxford, was found hanged in digs at St John’s College in the city.

Cal, who was autistic and transgender, took their own life after battling to find the right treatment in what their family described as the ‘all too prevalent but not yet understood crisis of suicides amongst autistic people identifying as trans’. 

Paul Shearer (pictured, left, in a The Cellar Tapes sketch with Stephen Fry), was studying computer science at Cambridge University while co-starring in the Footlights revue

He was later a regular performer on 1990s comedy series The Fast Show – seen here alongside Paul Whitehouse (left) in one of the programme’s ‘Suits You, Sir’ sketches

Shearer has also worked as a voiceover artist, corporate video writer and consultant, and also presented podcasts about commercial real estate in his vocation as a property journalist

Penny Dwyer

Also performing in the triumphant 1981 Cambridge Footlights show was Penny Dwyer, who was among the writers as well as on-stage performers.

Among her sketches was one set at a disco, in which Tony Slattery’s character lured her on to the dancefloor – only so he could swipe her chair to sit down.

Despite the acclaim for the troupe, and the fame her colleagues would go on to enjoy, Dwyer turned her back on the entertainment industry – though did continue writing.

She switched to a main career in metallurgy and worked on the development of the Channel Tunnel, before dying in September 2003 aged just 49 after a long illness. 

Richard Vranch, part of the 1982 Footlights team and later the main musician on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, said following her death: ‘Penny will be remembered as a writer and performer of many children’s shows, sketch shows and plays in Cambridge in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

‘She was a loyal friend, and remains one of the few female Perrier winners.’

In the back row, left to right, are Stephen Fry, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Hugh Laurie, with Penny Dwyer (left) and Emma Thompson (right) in front 

Penny Dwyer, pictured with fellow Footlights alumnus Paul Shearer, died in 2003 aged 49

Sandi Toksvig

Among the writers of additional material for the 1981 Cambridge Footlights show was Sandi Toksvig, though she did not appear in the sketches herself.

She was born in Copenhagen to a Danish journalist father and British mother and spent time growing up in New York before a move to London, then starting at Girton College in Cambridge to study law, archaeology and anthropology.

She performed in the Footlights’ first all-woman show, as well as contributing to the 1981 revue, and was also a member of the Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society.

After presenting children’s TV shows in the 1980s such as No. 73 on ITV, she has been a regular panel show guest – and also hosted Radio 4’s satirical The News Quiz between 2006 and 2015 and QI since succeeding Stephen Fry in 2016.

Toksvig, 66, also co-presented Channel 4’s The Great British Bake-Off between 2017 and 2020 but last October revealed it felt like ‘the longest three years’ of her life before her psychotherapist wife Debbie convinced her to quit as she ‘wasn’t happy’.

Sandi Toksvig staged the first all-female Cambridge Footlights show while there – she is seen here  returning to the university in October 2023, backing a new LGBTQ+ research initiative

Jan Ravens

Hugh Laurie was Cambridge Footlights president in 1981 and Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry and Tony Slattery were among the stage stars – but the director was actually Jan Ravens, who had previously been the society’s first female president.

Ravens, who was studying education studies and drama at Cambridge’s Homerton College, went on to work as a radio comedy producer after graduating.

She appeared on television shows such as Carrott’s Lib, Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Have I Got News For Your – while Spitting Image showcases her talent for impressions.

Ravens, now 66, starred in BBC show Dead Ringers, alongside Jon Culshaw – with her repertoire including Kirsty Wark, Nigella Lawson, Ann Widdecombe, Anne Robinson and her former Footlights colleague Sandi Toksvig. 

Her three children include stand-up comic Alfie Brown, who was nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Awards main prize – formerly the Perrier – in 2022. 

Comedy impressionist Jan Ravens directed the Cambridge Footlights show which won the Perrier Award in 1981 – she later starred in radio and TV programmes such as Dead Ringers

Other famous former Cambridge Footlights presidents 

The theatrical society was first founded back in 1883 yet enjoyed a new flush of success and nationwide attention in the early 1960s, as part of that era’s so-called ‘satire boom’.

Among the presidents during those years was Peter Cook, in 1960, who co-wrote and performed in what became a transatlantic smash hit called Beyond The Fringe – alongside Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller.

The Cambridge Footlights revue called Beyond The Fringe was a smash hit, starring (left to right) 1960 president Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett

Two future members of three-man comedy troupe The Goodies followed as president in 1963 and 1964, first Tim Brooke-Taylor and then Graeme Garden, before the role was taken in 1965 by Eric Idle – soon to be part of the six-strong Monty Python team. 

Future familiar TV faces who also held the position would be Clive James in 1967, Clive Anderson eight years later, Nick Hancock in 1984 and Sue Perkins in 1991.

David Mitchell, later of Peep Show and Would I Lie To You, was Cambridge Footlights president in 1996 – followed 10 years later by Simon Bird, who would go on to play Will in The Inbetweeners TV show and movies.

Mitchell’s Peep Show co-star Olivia Colman, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2018, was a Footlights member at the same time as him and Robert Webb.