Barbara Trentham was known as the Second ex-wife of John Cleese.
Barbara Trentham was an American model and actress. In the early 1970s, her photo appeared on many prominent magazine covers, including the English edition of Vogue.
Trentham was born in 1944 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, moved with her parents as a child to Weston, Connecticut, and graduated from Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut in 1962.
She then attended 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.
In 1980, while working in Los Angeles as a reporter and producer of Those Amazing Animals, she met British actor and comedian John Cleese at a Monty Python performance. They married in 1981 and through their marriage, they share a daughter Camilla who was born in 1984. In 1987, the couple separated and three years later they divorced.
During her marriage to Cleese, her love for art was reawakened and she began a third career as a painter, her preferred medium being oil paint.
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. She was also co-founder of Artists on the Bluff, a non-profit organization for artists.
Barbara Trentham died on August 2, 2013, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, aged 68, from complications from leukemia.