Jennie Franks

Who is Jennie Franks?

Jennie Franks is an English photographer, actress, and playwright. She was the first wife of Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson, from 1970 to 1974.

As "Jennie Anderson", Franks is credited with the lyric of the Jethro Tull song "Aqualung". Ian Anderson, the principal songwriter for Jethro Tull, has said, "[she] in fact was responsible for what became some of the 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.

Franks later moved to Los Angeles and married screenwriter Jeffrey Price. They relocated to Telluride, Colorado in 1993.

In 1999, Franks made a 28-minute video about AIDS in western Colorado titled Soft Smoke, AIDS in the Rural West.

Franks 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.

Franks started and continues as Artistic Director of the Telluride Playwrights Festival, an annual theatre festival each July based in Telluride.