Welsh actor, writer, comedian, screenwriter, film director and historian, Terry Jones, died on Tuesday night at his home in North London at the age of 77. His ex-wife, Alison Telfer, confirmed the news of his death.
In 2016, Jones announced that he had primary progressive aphasia – a neurological condition in which a person loses the ability to communicate.
He was a member of the British troupe Monty Python comedy team. He formed Monty Python in 1969 along with Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Graham Chapman, and Terry Gilliam. The television sketch show became a phenomenon in the UK and then in the US.
Jones and Gilliam jointly directed the first film after “Something Completely Different,” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in 1975 and then teamed up again on “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.” Jones was the sole director of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”
The popularity of their show soon made “pythonesque” entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In 2009, Jones told The New York Times, “The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves. We wanted to be unquantifiable. That ‘pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the O.E.D. means we failed utterly.”
Jones received a diagnosis of bowel cancer in 2006 and later he started applying his skills to humorous educational videos about health issues.
Jones was born in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, on February 1, 1942. His father, Alick, was a professional banker but was in the Royal Air Force at the time and stationed in Scotland. He moved to Claygate when he was 5. He married Alison Telfer in 1970 and got separated in 2005 and later divorced. He married Anna Soderstrom in 2012.
