Tim Curry, a character actor who created a gallery of delicious, very loony villains for stage and screen, including Dr. Frank-N-Furter in \u201cThe Rocky Horror Picture Show,\u201d has died. He was 80.<\/p>\n
Curry, who suffered a stroke in 2012 that put him in a wheelchair, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, according to his longtime manager and friend Marcia Hurwitz. No cause was disclosed.<\/p>\n
Known for his arch humor, a putty-like face and gift with voices, Curry earned three Tony nominations – for \u201cSpamalot,\u201d \u201cMy Favorite Year\u201d and \u201cAmadeus\u201d – and an Emmy nod in 1994.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like playing the more curious corners of the human mind and human behavior, partly because they\u2019re a tad more interesting,\u201d Curry told The Associated Press in 1993.<\/p>\n
Curry burst onto the scene as the Transylvanian Frank-N-Furter in the sci-fi, cross-dressing rock musical \u201cThe Rocky Horror Picture Show,\u201d which premiered in 1973 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went with it to Broadway and then starred in the 1975 cult-classic movie alongside Barry Bostwick, Meat Loaf and Susan Sarandon.<\/p>\n
The show was ahead of its time in terms of its representation of LGBTQ+ characters and has entered the pop culture lexicon for its many iconic and memorable scenes, including the song \u201cThe Time Warp,\u201d which has been covered by handfuls of artists, and the often-quoted phrase, \u201cDammit, Janet!\u201d The show was twice revived on Broadway, most recently in 2026 with Luke Evans playing Frank-N-Furter.<\/p>\n
Curry’s Frank-N-Furter had a posh British accent, but that almost wasn\u2019t the case. He said he tried German and American accents but pivoted after he heard a British woman on a bus talking with her friend.<\/p>\n
\u201cI met a woman on a bus who said, \u2018Do you have a house in town or a house in the country\u2019 and I thought, \u2018That\u2019s the voice!\u2019\u201d he told LA Magazine in 2015.<\/p>\n
For many years after the film\u2019s premiere, the British-born actor declined to discuss it. He didn\u2019t participate in activities promoting the film, which morphed into an interactive event at midnight shows. But he later warmed again to the project and embraced it at public events. Asked by LA Magazine how he viewed \u201cRocky Horror,\u201d he responded: \u201cWith a sort of bemused tolerance. It\u2019s neither a blessing nor a curse. I was lucky to get it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curry\u2019s Broadway career included starring in Tom Stoppard\u2019s \u201cTravesties\u201d in 1975-76, playing Mozart opposite Ian McKellen\u2019s Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer\u2019s \u201cAmadeus\u201d and King Arthur in the 2005 production of \u201cSpamalot.\u201d The New York Times said his \u201cstalwart, plummy-voiced Arthur wears a smile as inflexible as armor.\u201d<\/p>\n
His screen credits included starring as the child-killing monster in the 1990 miniseries version of Stephen King\u2019s horror novel \u201cIt\u201d and the double-dealing Cardinal Richelieu in 1993\u2019s \u201cThe Three Musketeers\u201d with Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen and Chris O\u2019Donnell.<\/p>\n
In his 2025 memoir, \u201cVagabond,\u201d Curry warned readers that while there were scraps of his nature in his characters, he was none of them. \u201cThe distinctions between who I really am and who I’ve pretended to be as an actor have proven to be a source of great disappointment to some audiences. It has not caused me much personal distress beyond the periodic necessity to deter stalkers,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Born in Cheshire, England, Curry was the son of a Navy chaplain and a school secretary. He was 12 when his father died and his mother subsequently went to work. Young Tim learned to cook his own breakfast, resulting in a lifelong passion for cooking, and sharpened his humor muscles.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father was a Methodist chaplain in the Navy, and we moved pretty much every 18 months,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I had to make my mark in new schools and new playgrounds pretty quickly. And a sense of humor is the best way to do that. I was always a kind of mimic, one of those awful, relentless children, I should think.\u201d<\/p>\n
Acting did not occur to him until his middle teens, when he attended a school for the sons of Methodist ministers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was lucky that it was a liberal kind of school; many of them in England are rather Dickensian,\u201d he recalled to the AP. \u201cThere was a lot of theater, and I sang, too; I had been singing in church from the age of 7. I had enormous opportunities to express myself in that way. I just got hooked, really.\u201d<\/p>\n
His training continued in 1965 when he entered the University of Birmingham, at that time one of three English universities with a drama department. \u201cI took an academic course, which I largely ignored, I\u2019m afraid, and just acted all the time,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He then went down to London and talked his way into his first job, \u201cHair,\u201d in the West End. Curry went on to the more formalized theater of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, where he was enlisted for \u201cThe Rocky Horror Picture Show.\u201d<\/p>\n
He went on, as the smug concierge, to futilely try to stop Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister from taking advantage of New York\u2019s swanky Plaza Hotel in \u201cHome Alone 2: Lost in New York.\u201d Curry also was Wadsworth, the unhinged butler with a secret past, in the also quotable \u201cClue.\u201d He also played a wealthy philanthropist in 1995’s \u201cCongo\u201d and opposite Carol Burnett in the movie \u201cAnnie.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHollywood tends to use European actors, especially English ones, as villains because they prefer heroes to be Americans. I think we come with a certain amount of style, which is hard for American actors to acquire,\u201d he told the AP in 1997. \u201cThey have to choose early on between New York and the theater vs. Hollywood and television and movies. In England there is still regional theater, where you can be assured work for several years doing all kinds of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
In later years, Curry lent his baritone voice to many voice-acting roles in children\u2019s TV series, including \u201cStar Wars: The Clone Wars,\u201d \u201cThe Wild Thornberrys\u201d and \u201cThe Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius.\u201d<\/p>\n
After a yearslong break from live-action roles, he played a plague doctor-masked man in a wheelchair in 2024’s \u201cStream,\u201d something the film’s director Michael Leavy called a dream come true.<\/p>\n
Curry, who never married and had no children, was deeply private about his personal life. But he wrote in his memoir that he was convinced to tell his story thanks to so many moving encounters with fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe notion that my experiences might resonate helps me persevere – if they strike a chord with only one teenager, alone with a book in his room, as I so often was; or that young woman reading this on an interminably long bus ride; or that older queen, hopefully still in his fishnets, who saw \u2018Rocky Horror\u2019 upstairs at the Royal Court; or that middle-aged mother who organizes \u2018Clue\u2019 watching parties and refuses entry to anybody out of costume; or that buttoned-up bank clerk who relishes musicals; or that woman who kicked me out of the Waverly for being myself,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tim Curry, a character actor who created a gallery of delicious, very loony villains for stage and screen,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,279,805,28,7445,7446],"class_list":["post-272720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-berks","tag-lehighvalley","tag-pennsylvania","tag-poconos-coal","tag-southeastern-pa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}