Tim Curry Gave a Generation Permission to Be Different

There is a particular kind of actor who never quite belongs to the industry that employs him. He belongs instead to the people sitting in the dark — the ones who mouth his lines before he says them, who arrive in costume, who keep a performance alive long after the studio that financed it has moved on. Tim Curry was that actor. The tributes arriving from those who worked beside him do not dwell first on his range, formidable as it was; they keep circling back to something a ranking cannot hold: his heart.

The retrospectives, understandably, write themselves as lists — the ten best roles, ordered and captioned. It is a reflex, and an incomplete one. To file Curry into a highlight reel is to miss the single instrument that made all of it cohere: a voice, and the theatrical intelligence behind it, that could hold seduction and menace in the same breath. The same man who purred as Dr. Frank-N-Furter could, without so much as changing register, become the thing beneath the drain that a generation still cannot unsee.

Consider what that instrument was asked to carry. As Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he turned camp into an argument for self-invention. As Pennywise in the television adaptation of Stephen King’s It, he located the horror not in the makeup but in cadence — the clown’s warmth curdling one syllable at a time. As Wadsworth in Clue, he made a butler’s breathless recap of the evening into a piece of comic choreography, the whole plot re-run at a sprint. Curry did not vanish into his characters so much as sign them; you always knew whose hand had drawn the line.

It is why he passed so completely into voice work, where the face is gone and only the instrument remains. He won an Emmy as Captain Hook, poured menace into Hexxus and a long shelf of Saturday-morning villains, and, as Nigel Thornberry, became a fixture of childhoods that never once connected that voice to the man in fishnets their parents had queued up for at midnight. Two audiences, a generation apart, each convinced he was theirs alone.

That sense of belonging ran in both directions, and it is what his colleagues reached for this week. Curry died at his Los Angeles home at the age of eighty, his longtime manager confirmed; a stroke had taken much of his mobility more than a decade earlier, and still he kept turning up — at conventions, in the signing line, in the wheelchair his fans learned to see past. “What a funny, sexy, original he was,” Susan Sarandon wrote of her Rocky Horror co-star. “But what I loved about him most was his heart. Even wheelchair bound he continued to be so sweet and generous with his fans.” Carol Burnett, who matched him scene for scene in Annie, kept it to a craftsman’s verdict: “Nobody could play lovable villains better than he could.”

Curry seemed to grasp the exchange better than anyone. Rocky Horror, he once reflected, “gave a lot of teenagers permission to be different, and I’m very happy that he did have that power.” He was speaking about the character; he was describing himself. His manager’s farewell made the same point in another key — that across five decades he refused to be boxed in, moving “fluidly between comedy, horror, drama, and music.” The lists rank the results. Those who knew him, and those who grew up on him, remember the permission.

Somewhere tonight a theatre will darken, a screen will flare, and a room full of strangers will shout his lines back at him in unison — the ritual unbroken, the call and its answer. It was always the truest measure of him. Tim Curry never needed the industry to keep him; his audience never had the slightest intention of letting go.

Tags: obituaries, It, tributes, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Tim Curry