Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam was born on 22 November 1940 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Beatrice (née Vance) and James Hall Gilliam. His father was a travelling salesman for Folgers before becoming a carpenter. Soon after, they moved to nearby Medicine Lake, Minnesota. In 1952, the family moved to the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Panorama City. Gilliam attended Birmingham High School, where he was the president of his class and senior prom king, and was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" having achieved straight A grades. During high school, he began to avidly read Mad magazine, then edited by Harvey Kurtzman, which would later influence Gilliam's work.

Gilliam graduated from Occidental College in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science. In 2003, he told Salman Rushdie about defining experiences in the 1960s that set the foundations for his views on the world:

I became terrified that I was going to be a full-time, bomb-throwing terrorist if I stayed [in the US] 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 US is still standing.