Jim Henson
Jim Henson
James Maury "Jim" Hensonwas an American puppeteer, artist, cartoonist, inventor, screenwriter, songwriter, musician, actor, film director, and producer who achieved international fame as the creator of the Muppets. Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised in Leland, Mississippi, and Hyattsville, Maryland, Henson began developing puppets while attending high school. While he was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, he created Sam and Friends, a five-minute sketch-comedy puppet show that appeared on television. After graduating from the University of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntertainer
Date of Birth24 September 1936
CountryUnited States of America
Yeah, I think we did the term Muppets before we got the show Sam and Friends - a few months after I started working.
I think my own strengths are in television production.
Yeah, we pretty much had a form and a shape by that time - a style - and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put those together myself for the needs of television.
I don't resent working long hours. I shouldn't- I'm the one who set up my life this way. I love to work. It's the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of-nd probably what I do best. Not that I don't enjoy days off. I love vacations and loafing around. But I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It's one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying than finishing a good meal- or looking at one's accumulated wealth.
I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.
Yeah, well when I first started working, it was $5 a show; it was probably a little higher by the time I got to my own show, but I remember that they put me under contract at $100 a week, which to me was really an astronomical price.
Since the show was done in small bits and pieces, we seldom taped anything more than a couple of minutes so generally you could learn your lines.
Let us use this log cabin as a means of looking back.
When Sesame Street came on - well, it was a combination - we were too busy to do commercials and it was a pleasure to get out of that world.
It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.
We really have a lot of ambitions for this film,
Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.
the most profound effect on children of any entertainer of his time.
I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.