Terry Gilliam - Early Life

Early Life

Gilliam was born in Medicine Lake, Minnesota to Beatrice (née Vance) and James Hall Gilliam. His father was a traveling salesman for Folgers before becoming a carpenter. Soon after, they moved to the nearby Medicine Lake.

The family moved to Panorama City, California, in 1952. Gilliam attended Birmingham High School where he was class president and senior prom king. He was voted "Most Likely to Succeed", and achieved straight A's. During high school, he began to avidly read Mad magazine, then edited by Harvey Kurtzman, which would later influence Gilliam's work.

Gilliam later spoke to Salman Rushdie about defining experiences in the 1960s that would set the foundations for his views on the world, later influencing his art and career:

I became terrified that I was going to be a full-time, bomb-throwing terrorist if I stayed because it was the beginning of really bad times in America. It was '66–'67, it was the first police riot in Los Angeles. In college my major was political science, so my brain worked that way. And I drove around this little English Hillman Minx—top down—and every night I'd be hauled over by the cops. Up against the wall, and all this stuff. They had this monologue with me; it was never a dialogue. It was that I was a long-haired drug addict living off some rich guy’s foolish daughter. And I said, "No, I work in advertising. I make twice as much as you do." Which is a stupid thing to say to a cop.
And it was like an epiphany. I suddenly felt what it was like to be a black or Mexican kid living in L.A. Before that, I thought I knew what the world was like, I thought I knew what poor people were, and then suddenly it all changed because of that simple thing of being brutalized by cops. And I got more and more angry and I just felt, I've got to get out of here—I'm a better cartoonist than I am a bomb maker. That's why so much of the U.S. is still standing.