Barbara Trentham

Background

She was born in 1944 in Brooklyn and moved with her parents as a child to Weston, Connecticut and graduated from Staples High School in Westport in 1962.

Education

She then attended the Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts in 1966, where she graduated and then moved the same year to England to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford.

Career

Trentham was also the second wife of John Cleese from 1981 to 1990. In the early 1970s Trentham worked as a model in London. Her photo appeared several times on the cover pages of British magazines including Seventeen and Vogue. in 1972 she landed a supporting role alongside Shirley MacLaine, Perry King and David Elliott in Waris Hussein"s horror thriller The Possession of Joel Delaney.

She then moved to Los Angeles to pursue her acting career.

She starred in Norman Jewison"s science fiction classic Rollerball alongside James Caan, John Houseman, Maud Adams and John Beck. In 1976 she was seen in the action drama Sky Riders with James Coburn and Susannah New York

In the same year she also had a cameo in the British-German television series The Girl from Outer Space with Pierre Brice. In 1978, she appeared in the produced for television horror film Wolf Moon and 1979 in an episode of the adventure series A Manitoba Called Sloane.

In 1993 she moved to Chicago, where she met the lawyer George Covington.

The two married in 1998 and lived in Lake Bluff, Illinois. She built up an art studio which became the meeting place and source of inspiration for local artists. Barbara Trentham died on August 2, 2013 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, aged 68, from complications from leukemia.

Achievements

• She was also co-founder of a local organization for artists.

Membership

She was a member of the Art Association of Jackson Hole, and organized events and art fairs there.