Christopher Guest

Christopher HadenGuest, 5th Baron HadenGuest , better known as Christopher Guest, is an EnglishAmerican screenwriter, composer, musician, director, actor, and comedian who holds dual British and American citizenship. He is most widely known in Hollywood for having written, directed and starred in a series of comedy films shot in mockdocumentary style. Scenes and character backgrounds are written, but actors have no rehearsal time and the ensemble improvise scenes while filming them. This series of films began with This Is Spinal Tap , and continued with Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, and For Your Consideration. Guest also had a featured role as the evil sixfingered Count Rugen in the film The Princess Bride.

Guest was born in New York City, the son of Peter HadenGuest, a British United Nations diplomat who later became the 4th Baron HadenGuest, and his second wife, Jean Pauline Hindes, an American former vice president of casting at CBS. Guests paternal grandfather, Leslie, Baron HadenGuest, was a Labour Party politician who was a convert to Judaism. Guests paternal grandmother, a descendant of the Dutch Jewish Goldsmid family, was the daughter of Colonel Albert Goldsmid, a British officer who founded the Jewish Lads and Girls Brigade and the Maccabaeans. Guests maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. Both of Guests parents had become atheists, and Guest had no religious upbringing. Nearly a decade before he was born, his uncle, David Guest, a lecturer and Communist Party member, was killed in the Spanish Civil War, fighting in the International Brigades.

Source: Wikipedia