Tim Curry Dies at 80: The Warrington Boy Who Made Frank-N-Furter Immortal

The English actor’s death at the age of 80 was announced on Wednesday and confirmed by the BBC. It closes one of the strangest and most gleefully unclassifiable careers British acting has produced – a boy from Warrington who turned a lingerie-clad mad scientist into a permanent fixture of world cinema, then spent five decades stealing films from underneath much bigger names.

How Tim Curry became Frank-N-Furter

Born in Warrington in 1946, Curry’s first acting job after university was the original London production of Hair in 1968. A fellow cast member, Richard O’Brien, asked him in 1973 to audition for a musical he was writing, and cast him as the flamboyant “sweet transvestite” Dr Frank-N-Furter. Curry put his stamp on the riotous scientist upstairs at London’s Royal Court, the show’s popularity snowballed, and a film followed. Released in 1975 alongside Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and O’Brien himself, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was not an immediate hit – and then simply refused to stop playing. It still holds the record for the longest-running theatrical release in film history.

The villain nobody else could have played

What followed was a career built almost entirely on delicious menace. He was Miss Hannigan’s con-artist brother in the 1982 musical Annie, Wadsworth in the 1985 murder mystery Clue, and a fixture of the same year’s fantasy Legend opposite Tom Cruise. He turned up in The Hunt for Red October, Home Alone 2 and the 1995 gorilla thriller Congo, was Long John Silver in 1996’s Muppet Treasure Island, and gave a generation of British children a lasting problem with storm drains – his Pennywise the clown in the 1990 television version of Stephen King’s It remains the benchmark.

The stage never let him go either. Three Tony nominations came his way: for Mozart in the original Broadway Amadeus in 1981, for My Favorite Year in 1993, and for King Arthur in the Monty Python musical Spamalot in 2005.

‘There will only be one Tim Curry’

Evans, who has called Curry “the G.O.A.T.” and an anchor for his own Tony-nominated turn, posted the letter on Instagram after the news broke, alongside a tribute of his own.

There will only be one Tim Curry. He was a force, a bright fierce flame, an exquisite charm and that rich vocal tone, he was an inspiration to me and so many people for the roles he played and the effect he had on so many of us.

The letter itself ended with a line that now reads like an epitaph: thanks “for your fearless performance, for creating something so enduring, and for inspiring generations of actors to be a little braver than they thought they could be”. Fifty-three years after a fringe show at the Royal Court, that is the measure of him. Curry did not just play Frank-N-Furter. He handed every actor who came after a licence to be braver, and he never once made it look like hard work.