Terry Gilliam was born in Medicine Lake, Minnesota on November 22, 1940. His father was a traveling salesman for Folgers before becoming a carpenter. Terry had two siblings: a brother ten years younger, and a sister two years younger.
The family moved to California because of his sister's asthma, and Terry Gilliam enrolled into Birmingham High School. He became class president and senior Prom King, was voted "Most Likely to Succeed", and got straight A's in school. During high school, he discovered Mad magazine, which was then edited by Harvey Kurtzman; this would later influence his work.
When Gilliam graduated from high school, he attended Occidental College, at first studying physics, then switching to fine arts before finally majoring in political science. Gilliam contributed to the college magazine, Fang, becoming the editor during his junior year and turning the magazine into a tribute to Kurtzman. Terry sent copies of Fang to Kurtzman. After finishing college, Gilliam worked briefly for an advertising agency before Kurtzman offered him a job at Help! magazine.
Terry Gilliam started his career as an animator and strip cartoonist; one of his early photographic strips for Harvey Kurtzman's Help! featured future Python castmember John Cleese. Moving to England, he animated features for Do Not Adjust Your Set, which also featured future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Gilliam then joined Monty Python's Flying Circus at its formation, as the only non-British member. He was the principal artist-animator of the surreal cartoons which frequently linked the show's sketches together, and defined the group's visual language in other mediums. He also appeared in several sketches and played side parts in the films.
Gilliam's Monty Python animations have a distinctive style. He mixed his own art, characterized by soft gradients and odd bulbous shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from the Victorian era. The style has been mimicked repeatedly throughout the years: in the children's television cartoon Angela Anaconda, a series of television commercials for Guinness stout, the Nickelodeon series You Can't Do That On Television, the Jibjab political cartoons, a bizarre set of Internet cartoons called Animutations, the television history series Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, recent episodes of the Alton Brown's Food Network television show Good Eats, and, to a degree, South Park.
Gilliam went on to become a motion picture writer and director.
His films are usually highly imaginative and fantastical. Most of Gilliam's movies include plotlines that seem to occur partly or completely in the characters' imaginations, raising questions about the definition of identity and sanity. He often shows his opposition to bureaucracy and authoritarian regimes. He also distinguishes "higher" and "lower" layers of society with a disturbing and ironic style. His movies usually feature a fight or struggle against a great power which may be an emotional situation, a human-made idol, or even the person himself, and the situations do not always end happily. There is often a dark, paranoid atmosphere and unusual characters who formerly were normal members of society. His scripts feature a dark sense of humour and often end with a dark twist (cf. tragicomedy).
His films have a distinctive look, often recognizable from just a short clip; Roger Ebert has said "his world is always hallucinatory in its richness of detail." There is often a baroqueness about the movies, with, for instance, high-tech computer monitors equipped with low-tech magnifying lenses in one film, 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. Most of his movies are shot almost entirely with extremely wide lenses of 28 mm or less, and extremely deep focus. Gilliam has always composed his scenes in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio.
Gilliam has acquired the unfortunate reputation of making extremely expensive movies beset with production problems.
After the lengthy quarrelling with Universal Studios over Brazil, Gilliam's next picture, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, cost around US$46 million, and then earned only about US$8 million in US ticket sales. A decade later, Gilliam attempted to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, budgeted at US$32.1 million, among the highest-budgeted films to use only European financing; but in the first week of shooting, the actor playing Don Quixote (Jean Rochefort) suffered a herniated disc, and a flood severely damaged the set. The film was cancelled, resulting in a US$15 million insurance claim. (Gilliam's reputation in this regard has been sufficient for the satirical newspaper The Onion to run a news article entitled "Terry Gilliam Barbecue Plagued By Production Delays".)
Despite this, Gilliam has also helmed some unqualified successes. The Fisher King (1991) was nominated for five Academy Awards, Twelve Monkeys grossed over US$168 million worldwide and The Brothers Grimm has grossed over US$105 million worldwide.