"I remember once having to stop performing when I thought an elderly man a few rows back from the front was actually going to die because he was laughing so hard."
Adrian "Ade" Edmondson, also known by the stage name "Eddie Monsoon", was born on 24 January 1957 in Bradford, England. One of the brightest stars of the Alternative Comedy circuit in The '80s, Edmondson has accumulated a surprisingly large number of credits as a writer, actor, director, comedian and television presenter. He also took a break from acting between 2008 and 2016 to spend time "farming" and performing as the lead singer and mandolin player of folk punk group The Bad Shepherds.
Edmondson was, for a significant portion of his career, part of various acts with his best friend Rik Mayall.
Edmondson has been married to fellow Alt-comedy star Jennifer Saunders since 1985, and the couple have three children.
Filmography includes:
- The Dangerous Brothers
- The Comic Strip Presents
- The Young Ones
- Filthy Rich & Catflap
- The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: "Treasure of the Peacock's Eye"
- Bottom
- Blackadder: "Private Plane"
- If You See God, Tell Him
- Guest House Paradiso
- Jonathan Creek
- French and Saunders
- Summer of Rockets
- The Last Jedi
- The Pact
- Ronja the Robber's Daughter (English dub of the 2014 anime)
Tropes associated with his career:
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He Really Can Act: While his rise to fame has mostly centered around being an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist and being good at slapstick, he has played a wide variety of roles, and was, around the time The Last Jedi hit theaters, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Benvolio in a production of Twelfth Night. - Heterosexual Life-Partners: He and Rik Mayall met at university and were basically joined at the hip since, in spite of being married to other people.
- Large Ham: He's known for playing loud, violent characters most codified in his role as Vyvyan.
- Playing Against Type: Edmondson, who has spent most of his career playing vile, unsympathetic slapstick victims, appeared in The Last Jedi as General Hux's very strait-laced adjutant.
- He also plays against type in an episode of the documentary series Surviving Disaster about the Chernobyl accident, where he plays Valery Legasov.
- In Sara Pascoe’s comedy Out Of Her Mind he played a fictional version of Sara’s dad, as a superficially shallow and annoying pseudo-intellectual Beat-poet type, who was actually rather quiet, regretful and enigmatic.
- Indiana Jones fans might remember him as the one-eyed thief Zyke in the Young Indiana Jones story "Treasure of the Peacock's Eye", one of his few serious villain roles.
