After directing the Python films and creating such characters as the Virgin Mandy and the monstrous Mr Creosote, he went on to make Personal Services and The Wind in the Willows
• Terry Jones dies aged 77
Terry Jones, who has died at the age of 77, was the Python with a sweetly open, guileless face and a rich voice that he often tortured into a high-pitched, strangulated warbling for his many “Hello, Mrs Smoker” drag roles. He was also the Python credited for inspiring the team’s consistent surrealist denial of conventional structure. It was Jones who took on the directing role for the Monty Python movies: sharing the credit with Terry Gilliam for Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975, but taking the helm on his own for their masterpiece, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in 1979, and the rather more patchy Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in 1983. His parallel and post-Python career was successful: with Michael Palin, he created the much-loved Ripping Yarns for
BBC TV and wrote well-regarded popular books on medieval and classical history.
But Jones’s face is stamped indelibly on my mind for the creation of two movie characters – one good, one horribly evil.