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Jim Henson

1936–1990 · 54 years Tier I

Half a ping-pong ball, his mother's coat, and a pair of jeans

Portrait of Jim Henson — Alan Light — 1989-09-17 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

He was raised in Mississippi and Maryland by a USDA agronomist father and a Christian Scientist mother, and remembered the family's first television as the biggest event of his adolescence. He joined the puppetry club at his Hyattsville high school, and at 17 a Washington station hired him to work marionettes on a Saturday show cancelled three weeks later. By 1955 he and a fellow student, Jane Nebel, had a nightly five-minute slot on WRC. The first Kermit was half a table tennis ball, fabric cut from his mother's old coat, and a denim sleeve cut from jeans. In 1958 he spent six weeks in Europe meaning to study painting, and learned that puppetry was taken there as seriously as sculpture. He took his Maryland degree in home economics.

He rebuilt television puppetry by aiming the camera at the puppet instead of at a stage — no proscenium, soft foam instead of carved wood, the performer's hand directly on the mouth so the face moved with the words. He paid for the experiment with advertising: more than 300 spots for Wilkins Coffee alone, seven seconds each, in which one puppet shot the other with a cannon for declining the product. In 1969 the Children's Television Workshop brought his team onto Sesame Street, where he performed Ernie and Kermit. Lew Grade's money financed The Muppet Show in 1976 after every American network passed, and it ran five years. Then the features: The Muppet Movie in 1979, The Dark Crystal in 1982, Labyrinth in 1986. He worked out Yoda's articulation for George Lucas and handed the performance to Frank Oz.

Jane Henson said he was so far inside the work that he had little time for her or their five children, and Cheryl said the children took up Muppets partly because working with him was the best way to be around him. The couple separated in 1986 and never divorced. Setbacks landed hard on a man everyone called gentle: when Labyrinth failed that same year his son Brian said it was the closest he had seen his father to turning in on himself. And he would not stop for anything. At two in the morning on May 15, 1990 he woke coughing blood, told his wife he thought he might be dying, and still waited two hours before agreeing to a taxi to the hospital. The intensive care director said afterward that a few hours earlier might have saved him.

At the memorial in Manhattan on May 21, 1990, nobody wore black, Big Bird sang Bein' Green while fighting off tears, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band closed with When the Saints Go Marching In. Because bacterial infections were not supposed to kill healthy men that fast, a rumor spread that he had died of AIDS, and the hospital had to knock it down. The Disney sale he had been negotiating collapsed with him. Frank Oz said in 2021 that the negotiation is probably what killed him. Disney finally bought the Muppets in February 2004, without their creator and without the Sesame Street characters, which had gone to Sesame Workshop in 2001. His ashes were scattered near Taos in 1992.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Jim Henson's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Sam and Friends television
A three-to-five-minute nightly show on WRC, where Kermit first appeared 1955
Wilkins and Wontkins commercials television
More than 300 seven-second spots, later remade for coffee brands across the country 1957
Sesame Street television
He built the Muppet characters and performed Ernie and Kermit 1969
The Muppet Show television
Financed by Lew Grade and shot in England after US networks passed 1976
The Muppet Movie film
Rainbow Connection reached number 25 on the Hot 100 and an Oscar nomination 1979
The Dark Crystal film
Co-directed with Frank Oz, from Brian Froud's designs, with no humans in it 1982

Life in brief

with age at each point

1954 aged ~18 Hired at 17 to work marionettes on a Washington children's show It was cancelled three weeks later.
April 15, 1956 aged 19 His older brother Paul is killed in a car crash
November 1958 aged 22 Founds Muppets, Inc. with Jane Nebel He had just come back from six weeks in Europe.
May 28, 1959 aged 22 Marries Jane Nebel at her family home
November 10, 1969 aged 33 Sesame Street premieres on National Educational Television
1976 aged ~40 Moves his creative team to England to make The Muppet Show Every American network had turned the series down as children's programming.
1986 aged ~50 Labyrinth disappoints commercially and he separates from Jane They never divorced and stayed close.
May 4, 1990 aged 53 Appears with Kermit on The Arsenio Hall Show, his last television appearance He told his publicist afterward that he had a sore throat.
May 16, 1990 aged 53 Dies at 1:21 in the morning, about a day after reaching the emergency room