Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam started off as an American animator and strip cartoonist, one of his early photographic strips featured John Cleese. Moving to England he animated features for Do Not Adjust Your Set and later became a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and principal artist-animator of the surreal cartoons with which it was frequently interspersed. He also appeared in several sketches and played parts in the films. Terry Gilliam has gone on to become a film director. Gilliam's Brazil is known among cineastes as a drastic example of things that can go wrong when a director does not have final cut and the studio steps in to "take control" of a situation it sees as spiralling out of control; Gilliam's battles with the studio are notorious and well documented.

His films have a distinctive look, often recognizable from just a short clip. There is often a baroqueness about the movies, with, for instance, computer monitors in one film equipped with magnifying lenses, and in another a red knight covered with flapping bits of cloth. He also is given to incongruous juxtapositions, say of beauty and ugliness, or antique and modern.

Gilliam is a graduate of Occidental College in Los Angeles and was the only American member of Monty Python.

Films directed:

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (co-directed with Terry Jones) (1975)
• Jabberwocky (1977)
• Time Bandits (1981)
• Brazil (1985)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1988)
• The Fisher King (1991)
• Twelve Monkeys (1995)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Gilliams' unsuccessful efforts to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, based on Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote, was the subject of the documentary Lost in La Mancha.

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