Terry Gilliam
November 22, 1940 -
Early Life: Terry was the first son of a former Folger's coffee saleseman turned carpenter. When he was born, in 1940, they were living in Medicine Lake, Minnesota. Two years later his sister was born, and in 1950 his brother was born. When Terry was eleven they moved to the dryer climate of southern California to help his sister's athsma.
Education: At Birmingham High School Terry lived out the American High School dream: straight As, varsity letter for pole-vaulting, president of the student body, prom king, and chosen most likely to succeed. He later attended Occidental College and finally settled on Political Science as a major after trying Physics and Fine Arts.
Marriages and etc: In 1973 he married Maggie Weston, a make-up artist who worked on Monty Python's Flying Circus. The two have two daughters and a son: Amy Rainbow (1977), Holly Dubois (1980) and Harry Thunder (1988).
Pre-Python Career: Gilliam worked for a time writing, designing and drawing for Help! magazine in New York. It was while doing this magazine that he first met John Cleese who was starring in a photo-story spoof in an issue of the magazine. After a while Gilliam joined the National Guard for a few months, went on welfare, and then decided to tour Europe. For a time he worked as a cartoonist in Paris and then he returned to the states and got a job for an add agency in California and, says Gilliam, "They hired me because of my hair." In 1967 Terry moved to London and became the editor of a magazine called the Londoner. Unhappy with working on magzines, Terry called John Cleese and asked how he could get into television. He wound up doing animations for Do Not Adjust Your Set, where he met Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Eric Idle. He also worked on the show We Have Ways of Making You Laugh.
Notable Sketches and Characters: Terry was the animator and that's where all his fame on the show sprung from. His funny animations were used to connect one sketch to another and to form the whole visual style of the Python shows. Some of his more notable works of animation were the Killer Cars bit, Spiny Norman (the large hedgehog who said Dinsdale) and of course the opening credits sequence for every episode.
He did not frequently appear in the episodes, but his most memorable performance is most likely Cardinal Fang from the Spanish Inquisititon. Other notable performances were the man with a stoat through his head, the knight who hits annoying guests with a rubber chicken, a viking who says "This is my only line" and dozens of other characters with few lines or an unpleasant costume. He didn't mind this, though. "I'm the luckiest one," he says, "Because I'm the least known."
