Tim Curry played villains, butlers, clowns and one mad scientist in pearls, and he played each of them as if he were having a better time than anyone else on screen. The joke was that he usually meant them harm as well.
Fi1m perspective
A lift comes down, the doors open, and Tim Curry is standing in it in a corset, a lab coat and a string of pearls. He sings Sweet Transvestite to two wet Americans on the doormat and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is his from that moment on. What he does in that scene he did for the rest of his working life. He moves as though the furniture will get out of his way, and he never once asks the camera to find him funny. We grinned like idiots, and we were also a little frightened of him, because Frank-N-Furter is a menace as well as a spoilt genius and Curry never let us forget the first part.
He had been playing Frank for two years by the time Jim Sharman put him on film, from the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1973 through Los Angeles and a short Broadway run, and he had known Richard O'Brien since they met in the London production of Hair in 1968. The film found its audience slowly and at midnight, and once it had, that audience would not let him be anyone else. He spent the next two decades taking the parts the corset suggested: Rooster Hannigan in John Huston's Annie (1982), Wadsworth the butler in Jonathan Lynn's Clue (1985), the horned Darkness under a great weight of prosthetic in Ridley Scott's Legend (1985), which Scott offered him after seeing Rocky Horror, and Pennywise in the 1990 miniseries of It, which frightened a generation of children who had never heard of Frank.
The line through all of them is that he found his villains funny and expected us to as well. "I've always tried to make my villains amusing," he said. "It gives them a bit more edge." The plummy voice, the raised eyebrow and the air of a man enjoying his own wickedness could be turned up for a clown or down for a butler, and they often made him the most watchable thing in films that did not otherwise reward the attention. That was also the trap. He wanted to be more than the eccentric and the fiend, and the offers kept arriving for exactly those.
The exception is The Hunt for Red October (1990), where he plays Petrov, the submarine's doctor, with no pearls and no paint, one worried face among Connery's crew. It is a fine film, patient and absorbing, and he is not the reason. It is one of the few times he agreed to disappear. From the late 1980s his voice did more and more of the work without his face, which suits an instrument that could do menace and mischief in the same sentence. Start with Rocky Horror, at home, with nobody throwing toast, and watch what he does between the songs. That is where the menace lives.
Biography
Timothy James Curry (19 April 1946 – 25 August 2026) was an English actor and singer. He was born in Grappenhall, Cheshire, and graduated from the University of Birmingham with a BA in English and drama in 1968. He made his professional stage debut in the West End production of Hair (1968) and originated the role of Dr Frank-N-Furter in the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show (1973).
Curry reprised the role in the 1975 film adaptation The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His other stage credits include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Broadway production of Amadeus (1980), the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance (1982) and King Arthur in Spamalot (2005–2007). Film roles include Rooster Hannigan in Annie (1982), Darkness in Legend (1985), Wadsworth in Clue (1985), Dr Yevgeni Petrov in The Hunt for Red October (1990) and Pennywise in the miniseries It (1990). He also worked extensively as a voice actor.
Curry suffered a stroke in 2012 and used a wheelchair thereafter. He died in Los Angeles on 25 August 2026.
