Who got their first big break at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?

The final preparations are being put to this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe and it's all go between now and August 3rd, when more than 250 venues open their doors.

All of the acts and companies putting shows together have just finished submitting the blurb for their slots in the programme and the clock is ticking while they polish and hone their performances.

This year is the 65th anniversary of the Fringe, which has seen its formula replicated by festivals across the world since the eight companies who hadn't been invited to take part in the Edinburgh Festival in 1947 decided to throw their own impromptu festival.

Since then, the Fringe has gone on to become one of the greatest shows on earth, pulling hundreds of thousands to the Scottish capital every year - last year alone, nearly two million tickets were sold!

It has also simultaneously helped launch the careers of just about every major UK comedian and quite a few actors too.

With this in mind - and with people already beginning to book hostels in Edinburgh ahead of the Fringe - we thought we'd pull together a list of our favourite comedians who first made their name on a stage somewhere among the craziness that is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Chapman and Cleese

Before Monty Python was a national treasure and John Cleese and Graham Chapman were household names, they had audiences in hysterics at the Fringe in the early 1960s.

Their 1963 revue as part of the Cambridge Footlights entitled 'A Clump of Plinths' catapulted them to stardom and was soon running in London's West End.

Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, David Hatch and Jo Kendall were also among the original cast, before Cleese and Chapman joined up with Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin to become Monty Python.

Though Chapman died in 1989 at the age of 49, Cleese became one of Britain's most famous stars with his lead role in the classic Fawlty Towers and, more recently, has played the role of gadget man R in the James Bond movies.

Thompson, Fry and Laurie

Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson are now three of the UK's most famous global stars, but as key members of the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club they were relative unknowns when they took their show 'The Cellar Tapes' to the Fringe in 1981.

The show was a huge success and the trio, along with fellow cast members Penny Dwyer, Paul Shearer and Tony Slattery, picked up the very first Perrier Comedy Award that year in recognition of their young talent. Since then, their careers have only gone in one direction.

More recently, Hugh Laurie became the world's highest-paid television actor when he starred as the lead in US medical drama House, while comedy partner Stephen Fry presents a range of successful television series and is an acclaimed author.

Emma Thompson has since starred in countless films, picking up a Best Actress Oscar and Bafta for her 1992 role in Howards End. She played Professor Trelawney in the Harry Potter series and will soon feature as Agent O in Men in Black III.

Rowan Atkinson

As a student at Oxford in the seventies, Atkinson was a member of the university's Dramatic Society and Oxford Revue, shooting to attention in 1976 when he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe aged just 21.

Known to millions around the world as Edmund Blackadder, Mr Bean and Johnny English, Rowan Atkinson is widely regarded as one of the world's top comedians with his distinct brand of physical comedy.
 
Sarah Millican

It is difficult to watch television these days without seeing Sarah Millican's northern grin on it, but a few years ago the comedian could have walked down the street without so much as a 'how do you do?'.

In 2008, Millican appeared at the Fringe with her debut routine 'Sarah Millican's Not Nice' - a show about her 2004 divorce - and instantly won Best Newcomer in what had been temporarily renamed the If.Comedy Awards.

The following year she ran her 'Typical Woman' show at the Pleasance venue and then narrowly missed out on the Edinburgh Comedy Award at the 2010 Fringe with Chatterbox, her third show.

Bill Bailey

Given that Bill Bailey is now one of the biggest comedians in the world and regularly sells out major arenas with his tours, his beginning at the Fringe was perhaps not as spectacular as it could have been.

In 1994, Bailey performed alongside Sean Lock in a routine called 'Rock', about a has-been rockstar and his roadie. The show failed to pull much of a crowd and one performance had just a single person in the audience, but it was later picked up by BBC Radio 1 and became a serial on the Mark Radcliffe show.

The initial setback nearly deterred Bailey from becoming a comedian, but his solo show at the 1995 Fringe, 'Bill Bailey's Cosmic Jam', went on to feature on Channel 4 and was released as a live DVD in 2005. The rest, as they say, is history.

Graham Norton

Irish comedian Graham Norton seems to have been on television forever, but the 49-year-old's career was launched 20 years ago when he starred in a comedy drag show at the Fringe.

Dressed in tea-towels, Norton's 'Mother Teresa of Calcutta' character created waves when a mistake by Scottish Television presented the star as the real-life Mother Teresa.

Norton no longer does drag, but his camp style and candid interviewing techniques have seen him rise to become one of the UK's hottest television presenters, with his own talk show, a slot on BBC Radio 2 and a commentary gig for the epitome of camp, the Eurovision Song Contest.
  

The 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs at more than 250 venues from August 3rd until August 27th and the full programme is set to be announced on May 31st.

Visit edfringe.com for more information and to book tickets.

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