Jennie Franks is an English playwright and filmmaker. She was the first wife of Jethro Tull frontman

Ian Anderson Ian Scott Anderson (born 10 August 1947) is a British musician best known for being the chief vocalist, Flute, flautist, and acoustic guitarist of the British rock band Jethro Tull (band), Jethro Tull. He is a multi-instrumentalist who also p ...

, and wrote some of the lyrics for the Jethro Tull song " Aqualung" (1971).

Career

Franks co-wrote and directed an educational film about the effects of

AIDS The HIV, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system. Without treatment, it can lead to a spectrum of conditions including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). It is a Preventive healthcare, pr ...

in rural Colorado titled ''Soft Smoke, AIDS in the Rural West''.''Denver Rocky Mountain News''. Denver, Colorado: 8 November 1999. p. 7.A She wrote and acted in the play ''Stuck!'', about "one woman's courageous struggle to get out of a locked basement bathroom at a coffee house and reclaim control of her stalled life", which debuted in New York in 2008. She filmed ''The Ballad of Arthur Muldoon'' with

Terry Jones Terence Graham Parry Jones (1 February 1942 – 21 January 2020) was a Welsh actor, comedian, director, historian, writer and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English, Jones a ...

. Franks founded SPARKy Productions in 1998, a group dedicated to highlighting social justice issues via creative performance, and acts as its artistic director. The organization produced the annual Telluride Playwrights Festival. The film festival culminated in 2016 with Franks' production of ''The Hispanic Women's Project''.

Life

Franks was the first wife of Jethro Tull frontman

, from 1970 to 1974. She wrote some of the lyrics for the Jethro Tull song " Aqualung" (1971). Ian Anderson, the principal songwriter for Jethro Tull, has said, " hein fact was responsible for lyrics in the first couple of verses ... I suppose in total probably about half of the lyrics were words or word associations that she had come up with," based on pictures of homeless men Franks had taken as a photography student. "And so she wrote some words and we fashioned that into lyrics. Some of the lines were definitely not lines I would have written. Like, “Snot is running down his nose” was not one of mine aughs it was one of hers." Franks later moved to Los Angeles and married

screenwriter A screenwriter (also called scriptwriter, scribe, or scenarist) is a person who practices the craft of writing for visual mass media, known as screenwriting. These can include short films, feature-length films, television programs, television ...

and novelist Jeffrey Price. They relocated to

Telluride, Colorado Telluride is the county seat and most populous town of San Miguel County, Colorado, San Miguel County in the southwestern portion of the U.S. state of Colorado. The town is a former silver mining camp on the San Miguel River (Colorado), San M ...

in 1993. Franks and her second husband have two daughters.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Franks, Jennie Year of birth missing (living people) Living people English dramatists and playwrights English stage actresses Jethro Tull (band) British emigrants to the United States