Tim Curry died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 80.
With his powerful baritone voice and big expressive eyes, the actor and singer inspired cultlike devotion among fans for portraying irresistible villains. Curry will be most remembered, and is probably most beloved, for his role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the tyrannical gender-bending alien scientist in both stage and screen versions of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Tim Curry was born in Cheshire, in northwest England, in 1946. His father, a chaplain in the British navy, died of a stroke when Curry was 12. The loss left him and his sister with their mother, who, he believed, lived with a serious mental illness.
Curry landed his first professional role when he was 22, in the original London production of Hair. There, he met the creator of the original Rocky Horror stage show, Richard O'Brien, who cast him as the outrageous Frank-N-Furter. Belting out such rock 'n' roll hits as "Sweet Transvestite," while dressed in platform heels, thigh-high fishnet stockings and a sparkly black corset, Curry's daring performance was a then-rare beacon to the LGBTQ community in a pre-internet age.
The 1975 film adaptation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show became a global cult phenomenon, notorious for rowdy and raunchy audience participation. "It's a guaranteed weekend party to which you can go with or without a date and probably find one if you don't have one," Curry told WHYY's Fresh Air in 2005. "It's also, I think, a chance for people to … maybe figure out their own sexuality."
Curry sang and danced in the 1982 film Annie as the scheming character Rooster. He played the mastermind butler, Wadsworth, in 1985's Clue, and terrified viewers (and young co-stars) as the clown Pennywise in the 1990 TV miniseries It. As Long John Silver, he hammed it up with Miss Piggy in Muppet Treasure Island, from 1996.
Onstage, Curry's roles included King Arthur in the original Broadway and West End productions of Spamalot, Tristan in the original London and Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard's Travesties, and as Mozart in Amadeus in the original Broadway cast.
In 2012, Curry suffered a stroke. It altered his speech and left him unable to walk. But he continued to work as a prolific voice actor. He accumulated more than 100 film, TV and video game credits over the course of his long career.
To the disappointment of fans who adored his portrayal of unapologetic queer joy in Rocky Horror, Curry never revealed anything publicly about his own love life or sexuality. "I have loved and been loved," he wrote in his bestselling 2025 memoir Vagabond. "The rest is none of your business."
Just as he wanted, Tim Curry took some secrets to his grave.
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