Jim Ignatowski

The Reverend Jim "Iggy" Ignatowski, played by Christopher Lloyd, was a fictional character in the 1970s television series Taxi. A gentle soul, Jim, in his own words, was "the living embodiment of the Sixties." His most noticeable character trait was his extremely "spaced out" behavior as a result of extensive 1960s drug use.

Ignatowski was born James Caldwell. He claimed to have been born in Spokane, Washington, although his often-unreliable memory makes this information quite open to question. However, he was definitely raised in Boston, Massachusetts as one of three children in a very well-to-do family.

Jim's mother died when he was quite young, leaving Jim's father (later played by Victor Buono) to raise the family. (Jim states while applying for his taxi driver's license that his father's name was Ignatowski—another example of his faulty memory.) Being busy with his thriving urology practices, Dr. Caldwell left much of this task to various family servants. The father's absence seemed to affect all the Caldwell children in some way: Jim was an extremely uptight and humorless person before he became a drop-out; his brother Tom remained humorless and somewhat mean-spirited throughout his adulthood; and his sister Lila exhibited marked nymphomania.

Jim was his father's favorite child. An excellent student, he attended Harvard. Then, after a party attended by his roommate Gordon Fog (played by Tom Hanks), his girlfriend Heather introduced him to "funny brownies" - containing marijuana – and persuaded him to partake. After ingesting these brownies, the transformation within Jim was virtually instantaneous. His term paper on "Plutarch's Lives" was forgotten—in fact, by his second semester at Harvard, he was writing his term papers in fingerpaint. ("The typewriter seemed so impersonal", he explained.) Jim would become part of the counterculture, and was ordained as a minister with the Church of the Peaceful ("investigated and cleared of all charges"). Around this time, Jim changed his last name to Ignatowski, believing it was "Starchild" spelled backwards.

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