TIM CURRY
(19 April 1946 – 25 August 2026)
The name of the English actor Tim Curry will forever be associated with The Rocky Horror Show, Richard O’Brien’s extraordinarily camp musical from the 1970s. In this send-up of the Frankenstein story, Curry played the outrageous Dr Frank-N-Furter, a pansexual, transvestite, diabolically insane scientist from the planet Transylvania with an aristocratic British accent. The show was a tribute to all those terrible sci-fi B-pictures in which a young couple gets caught in a storm and ends up in a mad doctor’s laboratory. The show opened in London’s Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court in 1973 and then moved to the nearby 230-seat Chelsea Classic Cinema before hopping down the street to the 500-seat King's Road Theatre. After that it transferred to the Comedy Theatre in the West End and had a successful nine-month run in Los Angeles and has enjoyed numerous revivals, national tours and other international productions. In many ways it has never gone away as in 1975 it was made into a film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, also starring Tim Curry, which had the longest-running release in film history, sparking cult interest and it is still going the rounds as a sing-a-long presentation encouraging its patrons to dress up as their favourite characters.
Although Tim Curry will be remembered for his outrageous turn as Frank-N-Furter, he had already trodden the boards in another perhaps outrageous show which caused much comment. This was Hair in 1968 where he met the Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien. Hair was about a ‘tribe’ of politically active hippies living a countercultural lifestyle, being anti-war and anti-conscription and well into the sexual revolution. Because of the nature of the piece, Hair could not be performed in public because it had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain who had, until the late 1960s, the power to veto anything that might upset certain members of the public, particularly those who might object to seeing performers swearing and appearing naked. However, after theatre censorship was abolished under the Theatres Act, Hair opened in London in 1968 and was an immediate success. Tim Curry was part of that success, alongside fellow nudists Paul Nicholas, Annabel Leventon, Elaine Paige, Peter Straker, Marsha Hunt, Oliver Tobias and Richard O’Brien.
Timothy James Curry was born in Grappenhall, Cheshire, to a school secretary (his mother) and a Royal Navy chaplain (his father). Tim was only a year old when the family moved to Hong Kong before eventually returning to Plymouth in Devon. Tim was then schooled in Bath and later graduated from Birmingham University with a BA in English and drama. His first major role was in Hair and then Rocky Horror truly established him as an actor of note. On Broadway he appeared in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties as the Dadaist Tristan Zara and in Peter Hall’s production of Amadeus, playing Mozart to Ian McKellen’s Salieri. Back home he was in The Pirates of Penzance at Drury Lane and then appeared in several plays at the National Theatre.
Among the films that Tim Curry did are Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout with Alan Bates, John Huston’s version of the musical Annie, as Miss Hannigan’s brother Rooster, and then Richard Eyre’s film of The Ploughman’s Lunch from a screenplay by Ian McEwan. He was also the Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott’s Legend, with Tom Cruise. In moving to the US in the late 1980s, Curry was taken up by more Hollywood producers including John Landis for the stellar comedy Oscar – as a linguistics coach – and he was the hotel concierge in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, the criminal mastermind Jigsaw in National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 and Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island (1996).
There were many others, too, but comedy and horror seemed to follow him throughout his career, including the direct-to-video Addams Family Reunion in which he played Gomez Addams. His last film was to have been the slasher Stream 2: Sudden Death, a sequel to Stream (2024) in which he played the sadistic villain.
Moving easily between film, theatre and TV, Curry also made many television appearances, the most famous being his role as Pennywise the Clown in Stephen King’s It (1990). He was also a successful voice-over artist on animated films, video games and audio books.
By 2012 his health had declined following a stroke and he underwent brain surgery. After that he had to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He died at the age of 80 but the cause has yet to be revealed. It was a sad ending for somebody who gave so much pleasure to his audiences on stage, in film and on television.
MICHAEL DARVELL