Age, Biography, and Wiki
Jim Henson was born on September 24, 1936, in Greenville, Mississippi. He was an American puppeteer, screenwriter, film director, and producer known for creating beloved characters like Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. Unfortunately, he passed away on May 16, 1990, at the age of 53.
| Occupation | Film Producer |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 24 September 1936 |
| Age | 88 Years |
| Birth Place | Greenville, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Libra |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 16 May, 1990 |
| Died Place | New York City, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
Specific details about Jim Henson's height and weight are not widely documented in available sources.
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Dating & Relationship status
Jim Henson was married to Jane Nebel from 1959 until their divorce in 1986. He then had a long-term relationship with Lisa Henson's mother, Jane, before marrying her in 1959. Later, he was in a relationship with Mary Ann Mang, a designer, until his death.
He enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park, the following fall as a studio arts major, thinking that he might become a commercial artist. As a freshman at the university, Jim took a newly offered puppetry class mostly populated with seniors, including his future wife Jane Nebel. He graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in home economics.
In the show, Henson began experimenting with techniques that changed the way in which puppetry was used on television, foregoing the convention of pointing the camera at a stationary puppet theatre proscenium and instead using the image created by the TV camera and lens to dynamically engage with his characters. He believed that television puppets needed to have "life and sensitivity". Rather than carving wooden puppets Henson built characters from softer, flexible materials like foam rubber; his first iteration of Kermit was made from a halved table tennis ball and fabric from an old coat belonging to his mother, with denim from a pair of jeans forming the sleeve for the puppeteer's arm.
In 1963, Henson and his wife moved to New York City where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. resided for some time. Jane quit performing to raise their children, and Henson hired writer Jerry Juhl in 1961 and puppet performer Frank Oz in 1963 to replace her. Henson credited them both with developing much of the humor and character of his Muppets. Henson and Oz developed a close friendship and a performing partnership that lasted until Henson's death; their teamwork is particularly evident in their portrayals of Bert and Ernie, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Kermit and Fozzie Bear. In New York City, Henson formed a partnership with Bernie Brillstein, who managed Henson's career until the puppeteer's death. In the years that followed, more performers joined Henson's team, including Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Fran Brill, and Kevin Clash.
Henson and fellow puppeteer Jane Nebel were married on May 28, 1959, in a small ceremony at Jane's family home. They had five children: Lisa (born 1960), Cheryl (born 1961), Brian (born 1963), John (1965–2014), and Heather Henson (born 1970). Henson and his wife legally separated in 1986; while he had a few short relationships with other women, he remained close to Jane for the rest of his life. Jane said that Henson was so involved with his work that he had very little time to spend with her or their children. His children began working with Muppets at an early age, partly because "one of the best ways of being around [Jim] was to work with him", according to Cheryl.
Henson took an interest in the Seth Material by Jane Roberts, a series of mystical-philosophical documents which Roberts claimed to have received via supernatural means. Brian Jay Jones reports in Jim Henson, the Biography, 2016, page 209: "...on July 30 [1974], [Henson] drove to Elmira, New York, to pay his respects to Roberts and her husband. 'I find this inspired material very beautiful,' Jim said of the Seth Material. 'It puts everything into a harmonious totality that I just love.'"
Henson appeared with Kermit on The Arsenio Hall Show in Los Angeles on May 4, 1990. This was his final television appearance. Shortly afterwards, he privately disclosed to his publicist that he was tired and had a sore throat, but he believed it was a minor illness. On May 12, Henson traveled to Ahoskie, North Carolina, with his daughter Cheryl to visit his father and stepmother. They returned to their home in New York City the following day, and Henson cancelled a Muppet recording session that had been scheduled for May 14, 1990, due to his ill health. His wife came to visit that night.
Henson was having trouble breathing when he woke up at around 2:00 a.m. EDT on May 15, and he began coughing up blood. He suggested to his wife that he might be dying, but he did not want to take time off from his schedule to visit a hospital, feeling that his illness would resolve on its own. Two hours later, Henson agreed to be taken by taxi to the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Shortly after admission, he stopped breathing and was rushed into the intensive care unit. X-ray images of his chest revealed multiple abscesses in both of his lungs as a result of a previous streptococcal pharyngitis he had apparently had for the past few days. Henson was placed on a ventilator but quickly deteriorated over the next several hours despite increasingly aggressive treatment with multiple antibiotics. Although the medicine killed off most of the infection, it had already weakened many of Henson's organs, and he died at 1:21 a.m. the following morning. He was 53.
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| Husband | Jane Nebel (m. 1959-1986) |
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Net Worth and Salary
At the time of his death in 1990, Jim Henson's net worth was approximately $100 million. Adjusted for inflation, his net worth would be significantly higher today. However, his legacy continues to generate revenue through the projects he founded and the companies he influenced.
In 1982, Henson founded the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States. Around that time, he began creating darker and more realistic fantasy films that did not feature the Muppets and displayed "a growing, brooding interest in mortality." He co-directed The Dark Crystal (1982) with Oz, "trying to go toward a sense of realism—toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive". To provide a visual style distinct from the Muppets, the puppets in The Dark Crystal were based on conceptual artwork by Brian Froud, and it was a critical success, winning several industry awards including the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and the Grand Prize Winner at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival. The film was less financially successful in theaters, but later claimed an enormous following and revenue when it was introduced on VHS for home entertainment. Also in 1982, Henson co-founded Henson International Television with Peter Orton and Sophie Turner Laing as his partners. The company was a distribution company for children's, teens' and family television.
* The 1990 television special The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson allowed the Muppets themselves to pay tribute to Henson. The special featured interviews with Steven Spielberg and others.
Career, Business, and Investments
Early Career: Henson began his career as a puppeteer during his high school years, eventually creating his first television programs while in college. He produced advertisements and experimental films before founding Muppets, Inc., later renamed The Jim Henson Company.
Major Works:
Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised in both Leland, Mississippi, and University Park, Maryland, Henson began developing puppets in high school. He created Sam and Friends (1955–1961), a short-form comedy television program on WRC-TV, while he was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, in collaboration with fellow student Jane Nebel. Henson and Nebel co-founded Muppets, Inc. – now The Jim Henson Company – in 1958, and married less than a year later in 1959. Henson graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics.
Henson died in New York City from toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. At the time of his death, he was in negotiations to sell his company to The Walt Disney Company, but talks fell through after his death. He was posthumously awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, and was named a Disney Legend in 2011.
Henson attended a variety of grade schools in his youth, including Hyattsville High School until it was closed in 1951. He completed his high school career at the newly opened Northwestern High School, where he joined the puppetry club.
Henson began working at WTOP-TV (now WUSA-TV) in the late spring of 1954, at age 17 years, hired to "manipulate marionettes" on a Saturday morning children's show called The Junior Morning Show, until the show was cancelled only three weeks later. This first break into the television industry was short-lived, but his talent landed him and his puppets an opportunity to continue working at WTOP-TV, lip-syncing on Roy Meachum's Saturday show.
Though Henson told people that "Muppet" was a portmanteau of "marionette" and "Puppet", many early Muppets were actually hand puppets, rod puppets, or some combination of the two. Direct control over the puppet's mouth, in combination with the softer construction materials, allowed the puppeteer to express a wider range of emotions and to more accurately move the puppet's mouth along with the character's dialogue or while lip-syncing to music. Commenting on his puppet design philosophy, Henson said,"'A lot of people build very stiff puppets—you can barely move the things—and you can get very little expression out of a character that you can barely move. Your hand has a lot of flexibility to it, and what you want to do is to build a puppet that can reflect all that flexibility.'"Sam and Friends was a financial success, but Henson began to have doubts about going into a career performing with puppets once he graduated. He spent six weeks in Europe during the summer of 1958, originally with the intent to study painting, but was surprised to learn that puppets were considered just as serious of an art form as painting or sculpture. After returning to the United States he and Jane made their partnership official, creating Muppets, Inc. in November of that same year, then marrying each other in 1959.
Among the most popular of Henson's commercials was a series for the local Wilkins Coffee company in Washington, D.C., created for a campaign managed by advertising manager Helen Ver Standig. Most of the Wilkins advertisements followed a similar formula: two Muppets, in this case named Wilkins and Wontkins (usually both voiced by Henson), would appear. Wilkins would extol the product while Wontkins would express his hatred for it, prompting physical retaliation from Wilkins; Wontkins might be shot with a cannon, struck in the head with a hammer or baseball bat, or have a pie thrown in his face. The Jim Henson Company has posted a short selection of them. Henson later explained, "Till then, advertising agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh."
Henson sold the rights to Wilkins and Wontkins to the Wilkins Company, who allowed marketing executive John T. Brady to sell the rights to some toymakers and film studios. However, in July 1992 Brady was sued by Jim Henson Productions for unfair competition in addition to copyright and trademark infringement. The Henson company claimed that Brady was incorrectly using Henson's name and likeness in their attempts to license the characters.
Henson, Oz, and his team were concerned that the company was becoming typecast solely as purveyors of children's entertainment, so they targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on the first season of the late-night live television variety show Saturday Night Live. Eleven Land of Gorch sketches were aired between October 1975 and January 1976 on NBC, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September 1976. Henson liked Lorne Michaels' work and wanted to be a part of it, but he ultimately concluded that "what we were trying to do and what his writers could write for it never gelled". The SNL writers were not comfortable writing for the characters, and they frequently disparaged Henson's creations. Michael O'Donoghue quipped, "I won't write for felt."
In late 1989, Henson entered into negotiations to sell his company and characters (excluding those from Sesame Street) to The Walt Disney Company for almost $150 million, hoping that he would "be able to spend a lot more of my time on the creative side of things" with Disney handling business matters. By 1990, he had completed production on the television special The Muppets at Walt Disney World and the Disney-MGM Studios attraction Muppet*Vision 3D and he was developing film ideas and a television series entitled Muppet High.
The Jim Henson Company and the Jim Henson Foundation continued after his death, producing new series and specials. Jim Henson's Creature Shop also continues to create characters and special effects for both Henson-related and outside projects. Steve Whitmire, who had joined the Muppets cast in 1978, began performing Kermit the Frog six months after Henson's death. He was dismissed from the cast in October 2016, and Matt Vogel succeeded him in the role of Kermit.
One of Henson's last projects was the attraction Muppet*Vision 3D, which opened at Disney's Hollywood Studios on May 16, 1991, exactly one year after his death. The Jim Henson Company retains the Creature Shop as well as the rest of its film and television library, including Fraggle Rock, Farscape, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. Brian Jay Jones wrote the book Jim Henson: The Biography. It was released on what would have been Henson's 77th birthday, September 24, 2013.
A biopic film based on Henson's life, known as Muppet Man, has been in development at Walt Disney Pictures and The Jim Henson Company since 2010. In April 2021, it was reported that Michael Mitnick was hired to rewrite the screenplay, previously written by Aaron and Jordan Kandell. Lisa Henson will serve as producer.
* The Jim Henson Exhibition: Imagination Unlimited, an exhibition organized by the Museum of the Moving Image showcasing over 300 artifacts from Henson's career, premiered at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle before opening at its permanent home in New York City in 2017. A traveling version of the exhibition, featuring over 100 objects and 25 historic puppets, has been hosted by several cultural institutions across the U.S. including Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles (June–September 2018), Albuquerque Museum (November 2019 – April 2020), Durham Museum in Omaha (October 2020 – January 2021), The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn (June–September 2021), the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (May–August 2022), and the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan (October 2022 – January 2023). The traveling exhibition's final stop will be the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore (May–December 2023).
Social Network
Although Jim Henson passed away before the widespread use of social media, his legacy continues to be celebrated across platforms through various fan pages and official Muppets channels.
The first seven-second commercials for Wilkins were an immediate hit and were later remade for other local coffee companies throughout the United States, such as Community Coffee, Red Diamond Coffee, La Touraine Coffee, Nash's Coffee, and Jomar Instant coffee. The characters were so successful in selling coffee that soon other companies began seeking them to promote their products, such as bakeries like Merita Breads, service station chains such as Standard Oil of Ohio and the downstream assets of Marathon Oil, and beverage bottlers such as Faygo. Over 300 "Wilkins and Wontkins" commercials were made. The ads were primarily produced in black and white, but some color examples also exist.
Henson's talk show appearances culminated when he devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog that became the first Muppet to make regular appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. Henson was so grateful for this break that he offered Jimmy Dean a 40-percent interest in his production company, but Dean declined, stating that Henson deserved all the rewards for his own work, a decision of conscience that Dean never regretted. From 1963 to 1966, Henson began exploring filmmaking and produced a series of experimental films. His nine-minute experimental film Time Piece was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1965. He produced The Cube in 1969. Around this time, he wrote the first drafts of a live-action movie script with Jerry Juhl which became Tale of Sand. The script remained in the Henson Company archives until it was adapted in the 2012 graphic novel Jim Henson's Tale of Sand. During this time, Henson continued to work with various companies who sought out his Muppets for advertising purposes. Among his clients were Wilson Meats, Royal Crown Cola, Claussen's Bread, La Choy, and Frito-Lay, which featured an early version of his character Cookie Monster to promote their Munchos line of potato snacks. Like the Wilkins Coffee ads of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the formula stayed fairly similar. For instance, one of the Claussen's commercials featured Kermit the Frog dangling from a window while a character named Mack asks him if he brought a loaf of the company's bread; when Kermit says he did not, Mack closes the window on Kermit's fingers and causes him to fall, suggesting he "drop down" to the grocery store to buy a loaf.
Henson began developing a Broadway show and a weekly television series both featuring the Muppets. The American networks rejected the series in 1976, believing that Muppets would appeal only to a child audience. Then, Henson pitched the show to British impresario Lew Grade to finance the show. The show would be shot in the United Kingdom and syndicated worldwide. That same year, he scrapped plans for his Broadway show and moved his creative team to England, where The Muppet Show began taping. The show featured Kermit as host, with a variety of prominent characters, notably Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, and Fozzie Bear, in addition to its large cast of supporting characters such as the Muppet musicians Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem with their chaotic drummer Animal. Henson's teammates sometimes compared his role to that of Kermit: a shy, gentle boss with "a whim of steel" who ran things like "an explosion in a mattress factory." Caroll Spinney, who performed as Big Bird, remembered that Henson would never say he did not like something. "He would just go 'Hmm.' ... And if he liked it, he would say, 'Lovely!'" Henson recognized Kermit as an alter ego, though he thought that Kermit was bolder than he; he once said of the character: "He can say things I hold back."
* The classes of 1994, 1998, and 1999 at the University of Maryland, College Park, Henson's alma mater, commissioned a life-size statue of Henson and Kermit the Frog, which was dedicated on September 24, 2003, on what would have been Henson's 67th birthday. The statue cost $217,000 and is displayed outside Maryland's student union. In 2006, the University of Maryland introduced 50 statues of its school mascot, Testudo the Terrapin, with various designs chosen by different sponsoring groups. Among them was Kertle, a statue designed to look like Kermit the Frog by Washington, DC–based artist Elizabeth Baldwin.
Education
Henson attended the University of Maryland, where he studied home economics because it offered a strong puppetry program. He began creating his own puppet shows during this time.
Henson's older brother, Paul Ransom Henson Jr. (1932–1956), died in a car crash on April 15, 1956. He was raised as a Christian Scientist and spent his early childhood in nearby Leland, Mississippi, before moving with his family to University Park, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s and later to Bethesda, Maryland. He remembered the arrival of the family's first television as "the biggest event of his adolescence", being heavily influenced by radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the early television puppets of Burr Tillstrom on Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Bil and Cora Baird. He remained a Christian Scientist at least into his twenties, when he taught Sunday school, but he wrote to a Christian Science church in the early 1970s to inform them that he was no longer a practicing member.
* In 1971, the University of Maryland's National Residence Hall Honorary chapter was founded as the Jim Henson Chapter. The UMD NRHH Chapter is still the Jim Henson Chapter to this day. The Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library created an exhibit from 2019 to 2020 highlighting Jim Henson's time at the university.
* The Jim Henson Works at the University of Maryland: 70+ digital videos available to students, scholars and visitors at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD)
Conclusion
Jim Henson's impact on the entertainment industry remains profound, with his creations continuing to enchant audiences worldwide. Despite his untimely death, his legacy through The Jim Henson Company and the enduring popularity of his characters ensures that his work remains relevant today.
