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Terence Graham Parry Jones (born February 1, 1942) is a British comedian,
screenwriter and actor, film director, children's author, popular historian,
political commentator and TV documentary host. He is best known as a member of the
Monty Python comedy team.
Jones was born in Colwyn Bay, Wales. He was educated at the Royal Grammar School in
Guildford, where he was head boy; he graduated in English at St Edmund Hall,
Oxford. While there he performed comedy with Michael Palin, among others, in The
Oxford Revue.
 Career
History
Before
Python
Jones appeared in Twice a Fortnight with Michael Palin, Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie
and Jonathan Lynn, as well as in The Complete and Utter History of Britain. He also
appeared in Do Not Adjust Your Set with Palin, Eric Idle and David Jason (Jones
speaks about this series during an interview which appears on both the DVDs for Do
Not Adjust Your Set and the At Last the 1948 Show). He wrote for The Frost Report
and several other of David Frost's programmes on British television.
Monty
Python
As a member of the Monty Python troupe, Jones is remembered for his roles as
middle-aged women and the bowler-hatted "man in the street". He typically wrote
sketches in partnership with Palin. One of Jones' major concerns was devising a
fresh format for the Python TV shows, devising a stream-of-consciousness style
which abandoned punchlines and instead encouraged the fluid movement of one sketch
to another and the cross-referencing of jokes. Jones also objected to TV directors'
use of speeded-up film, over-emphatic music, and static camera style.
Directorial
work
Jones co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Gilliam, and was sole
director on two further Monty Python movies, Life of Brian and Monty Python's The
Meaning of Life. (The latter featured one of his most famous characters, the
grotesquely fat Mr. Creosote). As a film director, Jones finally gained fuller
control of the projects and devised a visual style that complemented the humour
and, once again, concentrated on allowing the performers room to breathe. Examples
include the use of wide shots for long exchanges of dialogue, and more economical
use of music. His methods encouraged many future television comedians to break away
from slapstick or studio-bound shooting styles, as demonstrated by Green Wing and
The League of Gentlemen. His later films include Erik the Viking (1989) and The
Wind in the Willows (1996).
As an
author
He co-wrote Ripping Yarns with Palin, and wrote the screenplay for Labyrinth
(1986), although his draft went through several rewrites and several other writers
before being filmed; much of the finished film wasn't written by Jones at all. He
has also written numerous works for children, including Fantastic Stories and The
Beast with a Thousand Teeth.
He has written books and presented television documentaries on medieval and ancient
history and the history of numeral systems. His series often challenge
popularly-held views of history: for example, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (2004)
argues that the Middle Ages was a more sophisticated period than is popularly
thought, and Terry Jones' Barbarians (2006) presents the cultural achievements of
peoples conquered by the Roman Empire in a more positive light than Roman
historians typically have.
He has written numerous editorials condemning the Iraq war for The Guardian, The
Daily Telegraph and The Observer. Many of these editorials were published in a
paperback collection titled Terry Jones's War on the War on Terror.
Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (1980) offers an alternative
take on the historical view of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale as being a
paragon of Christian virtue. Jones asserts that, after closer examination of
historical rather than literary context, The Knight is actually a typical mercenary
and a potentially cold blooded killer.
Personal
life
Jones is married and has two children.
On October 21, 2006 it was reported in The Daily Mirror, that Jones had been
diagnosed with bowel cancer. Another article dated three days later, also by The
Mirror, indicated that the exploratory surgery performed on Jones had good
results.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Terry
Jones - Manifestor - Biography
