IN: Tara Maclay is a fictional character created for the action-horror/fantasy television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). She was developed by Joss Whedon and portrayed by Amber Benson. Tara is a shy young woman with magical talents who falls in love with Willow Rosenberg, one of the core characters. Together, they help Buffy Summers, who has been given superhuman powers to defeat evil forces in the fictional town of Sunnydale.

When Tara and Willow meet, their proficiency at magic is about the same, but Tara's knowledge of the craft far exceeds Willow's. Tara reveals that she has been practicing magic for most of her life, as her deceased mother had also been a powerful witch. Throughout season 4, Tara acts as a partner and guide in Willow's witchcraft, teaching Willow spells and performing magic together. Willow, however, is inherently talented, despite being new to the craft, and begins to progress much faster than Tara in the fifth season, including experimentations in dark magic. Tara struggles with understanding her place among the Scoobies with Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the leader, with which has a very friendly relationship; Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), Willow's friend since childhood; and Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), their mentor. Tara's primary role throughout the series is that of Willow's partner. She feels somewhat useless until the fifth season episode "Family" when the entire Scooby Gang (Spike included) makes it clear that she is unquestionably a part of them. The episode introduces some of Tara's blood family: a cold, authoritarian father who has lied to her all her life (telling her that her magical powers are a result of her being part-demon on her mother's side); an overbearing brother; and a judgmental, repressed and repressive cousin; all of whom Tara dismisses at the end of the episode. Tara later reveals in "The Body" that her mother had died when she was 17. In the following episode, when Dawn is acting out, Tara confides to Buffy that she had to deal with her brother after her mother's death. No more of her backstory is revealed in the series. As Willow's character grows more self-assured and powerful through the seasons, Tara takes over some of the role of being placed in peril and needing to be rescued. The fifth season's primary villain, or Big Bad, is Glory, a goddess too powerful for Buffy to fight alone. Glory tortures Tara in order to gain information on the Key, but Tara asserts willpower and resists Glory, resulting in Glory stealing her sanity, and prompting Willow to go searching for retribution. Glory states she feels "buzzed" after feeding on Tara's mind, indicating Tara's powerful intellect (and possibly suggesting her power as a witch). Buffy scholar Ian Shuttleworth writes that Benson was able to "admirably" portray the same range of emotions inherent in Tara although the character loses her identity. Willow's powers are significant enough that she is able to battle Glory more effectively than Buffy, if not completely successfully. In the final episode of season 5, Willow uses her magic to restore Tara's sanity, significantly weakening Glory in the process. Tara also becomes a guide of sorts, and a maternal figure. She appears to Buffy in a dream in the fourth season finale "Restless" to tell her about the arrival of Buffy's sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) and act as a translator for the voiceless First Slayer. Following the death of Joyce Summers and Buffy's sacrifice to save the world at the end of the fifth season, Tara and Willow move into the Summers house, taking Joyce's bedroom and becoming Dawn's surrogate parents.
QUESTION: Does Tara have any doubts about magic?
IN: Gilliam was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Beatrice (nee Vance) and James Hall Gilliam. His father was a travelling salesman for Folgers before becoming a carpenter. Soon after, they moved to nearby Medicine Lake, Minnesota. The family moved to the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Panorama City in 1952.

Gilliam was a part of Monty Python's Flying Circus from its outset, credited at first as an animator (his name was listed separately after the other five in the closing credits) and later as a full member. His cartoons linked the show's sketches together and defined the group's visual language in other media (such as LP and book covers and the title sequences of their films). His animations mix his own art, characterised by soft gradients and odd, bulbous shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from the Victorian era. In 1978, Gilliam published Animations of Mortality, an illustrated, tongue-in-cheek, semi-autobiographical how-to guide to his animation techniques and the visual language in them. Roughly 15 years later, between the release of the CD-ROM game Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time in 1994, which used many of Gilliam's animation templates, and the making of Gilliam's film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Gilliam was in negotiations with Enteractive, a software company, to tentatively release in the autumn of 1996 a CD-ROM under the same title as his 1978 book, containing all of his thousands of 1970s animation templates as license-free clip arts for people to create their own flash animations, but the project hovered in limbo for years, probably because Enteractive was about to downsize greatly in mid-1996 and changed its focus from CD-ROM multimedia presentations to internet business solutions and web hosting in 1997 (in the introduction to their 2004 book Terry Gilliam: Interviews, David Sterrit and Lucille Rhodes claimed that the internet had overwhelmed the "computer-communications market" and gave this as the reason that the Animations of Mortality CD-ROM never materialised). Around the time of Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), the project had changed into the idea of releasing his 1970s animation templates as a license-free download of Adobe After Effects or similar files. Besides creating the animations, he also appeared in several sketches, though he rarely had main roles and did considerably less acting in the sketches. He did, however, have some notable sketch roles, such as Cardinal Fang of the Spanish Inquisition; the bespectacled commenter who said, "I can't add anything to that!" in the sketch "Election Night Special"; Kevin Garibaldi, the brat on the couch shouting "I want more beans!" in the sketch "Most Awful Family in Britain 1974" (episode 45); the Screaming Queen in a cape and mask in The Visitors; and Percy Bysshe Shelly in Ant Poetry Reading. More frequently, he played parts that no one else wanted to play, generally because they required a lot of makeup or uncomfortable costumes (such as the recurring character of a knight in armour who ended sketches by walking on and hitting one of the other characters over the head with a plucked chicken). He took a number of small roles in the films, including Patsy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which he co-directed with Terry Jones; Gilliam was responsible for photography, while Jones guided the actors' performances) and the jailer in Monty Python's Life of Brian. He also designed the covers of most of the Monty Python albums, including Another Monty Python Record, The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief and Monty Python Live at Drury Lane, and their film soundtrack albums.
QUESTION:
What role did Terry play in Monty Python?