{{Short description|British actor, playwright and photographer}} {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2024}} {{Use British English|date=August 2015}}
[[File:Jennie_Franks.jpg|thumb|Jennie Franks]]
'''Jennie Franks''' is an English playwright and filmmaker. She was the first wife of [[Jethro Tull (band)|Jethro Tull]] frontman [[Ian Anderson]], and wrote some of the lyrics for the Jethro Tull song "[[Aqualung (song)|Aqualung]]" (1971).
== Career == Franks co-wrote and directed an educational film about the effects of [[AIDS]] in rural Colorado titled ''Soft Smoke, AIDS in the Rural West''.<ref name="Rocky 1999 7">''Denver Rocky Mountain News''. Denver, Colorado: 8 November 1999. p. 7.A</ref><ref name="HIV Plus p. 12">{{cite book | title=HIV Plus | publisher=Here Publishing | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jmUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA12 | access-date=6 September 2020 | page=12}}</ref> 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.<ref>[http://www.broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=24828 Broadway World] Retrieved on 7 March 2008.</ref> She filmed ''The Ballad of Arthur Muldoon'' with [[Terry Jones]].<ref name="Telluride Inside... and Out 2009">{{cite web | title=3rd annual Telluride Playwrighting Festival opens with reading July 1 | website=Telluride Inside... and Out | date=29 June 2009 | url=https://www.tellurideinside.com/2009/06/3rd-annual-telluride-playwrighting-festival-opens-with-reading-july-1.html | access-date=6 September 2020}}</ref>
Franks founded SPARKy Productions in 1998, a group dedicated to highlighting social justice issues via creative performance, and acts as its artistic director.<ref name="TDP">{{cite web |title=Mountain Confidential: Jennie Franks |url=https://www.telluridenews.com/the_watch/article_b7834aea-3145-11e5-b3c7-032bec626ea9.html |website=The Watch |date=23 July 2015 |publisher=Telluride Daily Planet |accessdate=6 September 2020}}</ref> The organization produced the annual Telluride Playwrights Festival.<ref name="TDP" /> The film festival culminated in 2016 with Franks' production of ''The Hispanic Women's Project''.<ref name="Telluride Inside... and Out 2016">{{cite web | title=The Hispanic Women's Project: Inspired, Inspiring, GO! | website=Telluride Inside... and Out | date=27 July 2016 | url=https://www.tellurideinside.com/2016/07/the-hispanic-womens-project-go.html | access-date=6 September 2020}}</ref>
== Life == Franks was the first wife of [[Jethro Tull (band)|Jethro Tull]] frontman [[Ian Anderson]], from 1970 to 1974. She wrote some of the lyrics for the Jethro Tull song "[[Aqualung (song)|Aqualung]]" (1971). Ian Anderson, the principal songwriter for Jethro Tull, has said, "[she] in 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.<ref>[http://remus.rutgers.edu/JethroTull/FAQ.html#Q7 Who is Jennie Anderson, the person credited on the ''Aqualung'' album as the author of the title track?] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121022154806/http://remus.rutgers.edu/JethroTull/FAQ.html|date=22 October 2012}}, Jethro Tull FAQ. Retrieved 26 October 2012.</ref> "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 [laughs], it was one of hers."<ref>{{cite magazine | url=https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/jethro-tulls-ian-anderson-my-life-in-10-songs-666164/aqualung-666169/ | title=Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson: My Life in 10 Songs | magazine=[[Rolling Stone]] | date=27 June 2018 }}</ref>
Franks later{{when?|date=April 2024}} moved to Los Angeles and married [[screenwriter]] and novelist [[Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman|Jeffrey Price]]. They relocated to [[Telluride, Colorado]] in 1993.<ref name="Rocky 1999 7" /> Franks and her second husband have two daughters.{{cn|date=June 2020}}
==References== {{Reflist}}
{{Authority control}} {{DEFAULTSORT:Franks, Jennie}} [[Category:Year of birth missing (living people)]] [[Category:Living people]] [[Category:English dramatists and playwrights]] [[Category:English stage actresses]] [[Category:Jethro Tull (band)]] [[Category:British emigrants to the United States]]