CLEESE UNVEILS PLAQUE AT FREUD'S LONDON HOME
by the Associated Press (AP)
Friday, 28 June 2002

John Cleese and his wife, Alyce Faye Cleese, unveil the two plaques Source: AP Photo/Richard Lewis

LONDON - British actor and comedian John Cleese on Friday [28 June] unveiled a commemorative plaque on the north London home of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

Cleese, who was in London to film his role as a nearly headless ghost in the second "Harry Potter" movie, unveiled an English Heritage blue plaque at the house in Freud's honor.

Cleese's wife, psychotherapist Alice Faye Cleese, unveiled a second blue plaque at the house for her teacher, Freud's daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychoanalysis.

John and Alyce Faye pose for photographers Source: AP Photo/Richard Lewis

Blue plaques are placed on buildings of cultural or historic significance in the United Kingdom, usually carrying the dates a famous person lived there.

Freud was a "great anglophile," said Cleese, a patron of the Freud Museum.

"He liked England enormously. He wrote that despite the fog and rain, the drunkenness and conservatism, it appealed to him," said Cleese.

The house, Freud's home from 1938 until his death the following year, was converted into The Freud Museum in 1986. Anna Freud, who lived and worked at the Hampstead house, died in 1982.

Freud had lived for many years in Vienna, where his consulting rooms are also preserved, but he fled the Nazis and came to England with his family in 1938.