Tim Curry is gone.
News broke early Wednesday that the actor died at the age of 80 at his home in Los Angeles. While he had been largely out of the spotlight over the past few years, forced into retirement after suffering a major stroke in 2012, he had made sporadic appearances at conventions and screenings, where he was always welcomed like the legend he was. It is a rare actor who can simultaneously be an unfussy jobbing thespian across mediums and a bona fide icon who helped to change movie history. But he did just that.
“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, returning Curry’s generational performance as the sweet transvestite Dr. Frank-N-Furter to the spotlight. Not that he ever really left it. “Rocky Horror” is the consummate cult classic, the midnight movie that overcame flop status to become a defining text of queer cinema and musical theater. It’s nigh-on impossible to imagine anyone else as Frank, He had originated the role on stage and had so thoroughly shaped the role with his brand of lasciviousness that he ensured every actor who put on the fishnets after him was, whether they admitted it or not, copying his performance.
It’s a magnificent turn, beyond magnetic and imbued with a theatrical intensity that only makes the jokes land harder. The role would cast its shadow across Curry’s career for decades, but it also helped him to define a unique kind of on-screen masculinity that pushed back against the broken antiheroes of the ‘70s. Curry’s gentlemen were impish, openly seductive, but also a parody of the entire game. He clearly had a ball with the notion of manhood, and he made it malleable across his wildly varied roster of performances.
The greatest of character actors are those who are so consistent in their excellence that they become, in their own way, underrated. We take them for granted because we expect nothing less than pure quality. Tim Curry exemplified that ethos, ensuring that no job was too small for him to make it into a scene-stealer. His filmography is a crowded canvas of supporting turns, TV movies, voice-overs, shlock-fests and even video games. Ask a group of people to name their first sighting of Tim Curry and you’ll get a unique answer every time. Yes, there was Frank and Pennywise, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. There was his toe-tapping villainy in “Annie”, his committed hammery in “Muppet Treasure Island,” his annoyed butler in “Clue,” a turn as William Shakespeare in a six-part British miniseries from the ‘70s.
He excelled in bad guy roles, especially those of Shakespearean theatricality where you end up liking him way more than the hero. As the Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott’s 1985 film “Legend,” Curry is unnervingly seductive, a far more enticing option than plain old Tom Cruise. But of course he could flip that on its head and leave you with sleepless nights of terror.
His Pennywise in the two-part TV adaptation of Stephen King’s “IT” is so life-ruining it became a rite of passage to be terrified by his character at a too-young age. Utterly unrecognizable under heavy make-up and prosthetics, and his instantly familiar voice warped, Curry made the innocence of a clown into a toxic scab of pure evil. What makes it linger so effectively is that sliver of familiarity beneath the red nose, that sense of a mundane human malice with which the kids of the Losers Club are all too well acquainted.
But never fear, for he was also a consummate performer for children’s entertainment, from “The Worst Witch” to voice work in “Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest” to the snivelling hotel concierge outwitted by Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.” For millennials of a certain age, the discovery that Nigel Thornberry of “The Wild Thornberries,” the eccentric patriarch and wildlife documentarian with a mammoth nose and no sense of self-preservation, was also Frank N. Furter was earth-shattering.
And that barely scratches the surface of his voice work, which could be heard in everything from “Freakazoid” to “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” to video games like the Gabriel Knight franchise. It was a testament to his craft that he could retain his intrinsic mischievousness and make it safe but appealing for a younger audience.
If all Tim Curry had done was Frank N. Furter then he would still have his place in the pop culture pantheon set in stone. That his career expanded well beyond that and gave him literally dozens of memorable moments that defined him for decades of fans is something truly special. How many people can say they were both iconic and underrated? He always made us shiver with antici…
