THE WASHINGTON POST: Actor Tim Curry was a chameleon of the stage who brought to life a cast of misfits

Tim Curry, a British actor with a raffish swagger and Cheshire cat smile who found his most enduring acclaim in black fishnets and corsets as the gender-blurring mad doctor in a Broadway show that became the cult film musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 80.

His death was announced by his manager, Marcia Hurwitz, who did not cite a cause.

Curry had a stroke in 2012 that left him with partial paralysis and relying on a wheelchair for mobility.

Curry first made his way to the London stage in the late 1960s with the hippie-culture celebration Hair and seemed to cling to the show’s risk-taking spirit over a five-decade career.

His more than 30 film roles — in addition to the cross-dressing Dr Frank ‘N’ Furter in 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show — included the shifty butler in the board game-inspired Clue (1985) and a hapless concierge in the slapstick comedy Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).

On Broadway, he received Tony Award nominations for portraying the musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus (1980), a swashbuckling past-his-prime matinee idol in My Favorite Year (1992) and King Arthur in the medieval farce Spamalot (2005), written by Monty Python alumnus Eric Idle.

Curry was not an actor who dissolved into a part. Instead, his roles most often became filtered through his distinctive mien: An elastic and slightly craggy grin and expressive high-arched eyebrows — “a clown’s face,” he ventured — and variations of English accents from endearing to menacing. He was once described in a film blog as both a performer and a mood.

“I play glorious misfits,” he said.

None were as fabulously eccentric as his movie debut: strutting and preening as Dr Frank ‘N’ Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which became a staple of midnight screenings and audience antics that were as much part of the experience as the movie itself.

“I’m just a sweet transvestite,” Curry sang through fire-engine-red lipstick, “from Transsexual, Transylvania.”

Understanding the roots of Rocky Horror requires a prelude with Hair. Curry was just a few months out of the University of Birmingham in 1968 with a degree in English and drama when he drove to London with friends seeking to join a street theatre troupe. Then they heard about auditions for the London premiere of “Hair,” a 1967 musical that was a New York hit.

The 22-year-old Curry had no professional stage experience and bluffed his way to an audition. He landed the part of Woof, an androgynous, nature-loving soul, on the strength of his vocals: A sonorous baritone that grew out of classical voice training.

Also in the show was a one-time stuntman, Richard O’Brien, who was part of the Hair touring company.

He was fiddling, meanwhile, with some songs of his own. One day in the early 1970s, O’Brien performed some of his tunes for a London theatre duo, director Jim Sharman and composer Richard Hartley.

They sensed something bigger was there. Sharman said he could secure the stage for a few weeks at the Royal Court Theatre’s upstairs venue. O’Brien churned out a script and wrote more songs with help from Hartley.

What emerged was a stage musical — The Rocky Horror Show — that borrowed (very, very loosely) from Frankenstein with an overlay of pancake foundation and smoky eye shadow: A straitlaced couple ends up stranded at the mansion of the aforementioned scientist-in-drag, who creates a boy-toy creature for his pleasure, Rocky — and the uptight sweethearts, Brad and Janet, discover they are not so conventional after all.

Much more takes place, weird and whimsical, and all in rock-opera style with songs such as the pulsing dance number Time Warp and Frank ‘N’ Furter’s solo, Sweet Transvestite:

“Don’t get strung out by the way that I look,

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,

“I’m not much of a man by the light of day,

“But by night I’m one hell of a lover.”

O’Brien had suggested Curry try out for the lead. And Curry — the free-spirited son a Methodist clergyman — saw the potential.

“I thought, ‘Boy, if this works, it’s going to be a smash,’” he told syndicated entertainment columnist Frank Lovece in 1992. For his audition, Curry used the sexually suggestive Little Richard hit Tutti Frutti.

Some early reviewers embraced the mash-up of high camp, sci-fi and sexual discovery.

“It achieves the rare feat of being witty and erotic at the same time,” said a review in the Guardian after The Rocky Horror Show opened on the London stage in 1973.

“Tim Curry also gives a garishly Bowiesque performance as the ambisextrous doctor.”

Curry had tried out various accents in rehearsals, including American, before deciding to go with upper-crust British. “Like the queen,” he told NPR’s Fresh Air in 2005.

Rocky Horror and Curry made their way to Broadway in 1975, but the show struggled and closed after 45 performances. A movie version premiered in London that August and reached US audiences a month later.

Curry was “the best thing in the movie,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert, “maybe because he seems to be having the most fun.” But crowds began to thin, and executives at Twentieth Century Fox had pretty much given up hope for the film.

“A plangent silence,” Curry said, describing the studio heads’ reaction at the pre-release viewing, “that just sat there like porridge”.

Midnight shows

At the Waverly Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village neighbourhood, manager Denise Borden had a plan. She loved the party atmosphere of Rocky Horror and decided to hold midnight screenings.

A crew of regulars — dressed as Curry’s Frank ‘N’ Furter and other members of the cast — took over the first rows of the Waverly balcony for the show.

One night, a kindergarten teacher from Staten Island named Louis Farese Jr. shouted back during one of the movie’s early scenes when Janet and Brad’s car gets a flat during a rainstorm. Janet (played by Susan Sarandon) covers her head with a newspaper.

“Buy an umbrella,” yelled Farese, adding a salty epithet, according to an account in the 1982 book Midnight Movies, by film critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Soon, fans were shouting back at the screen at other parts of the film in New York and other cities around the country as Rocky Horror became a regular midnight event.

Next came bags full of props to add to the free-form madness, making Rocky Horror one of the most immersive interplays of show and showgoer in cinema history.

Janet and Brad stepped into the rain. The audience let loose with squirt guns.

“A toast,” said Curry’s character at a dinner scene. People flung toast at the screen.

“Great Scott,” cried Brad (Barry Bostwick). Toilet paper went flying.

During a wedding scene, the theatre crowd hurled rice.

The audience got up to dance the Time Warp — “Put your hands on your hips/You bring your knees in tight” — and rock out with biker Eddie (played by the singer Meat Loaf) during the song “What Ever Happened to Saturday Night.” (O’Brien played Frank ‘N’ Furter’s skeletal and hunchbacked servant Riff Raff.)

Curry described Rocky Horror as a cinematic rite of passage for many fans.

“It’s also a chance for people to try on a few roles for size, you know?” he said. “Figure out, help them maybe figure out their own sexuality.”

He declined to publicly discuss his personal relationships or sexuality but was always eager to delve into Rocky Horror analysis.

In 1976, he was asked by Interview magazine: “What’s the nice son of a Methodist minister doing in a part like Frank ‘N’ Furter?”

“Living out his contradictions, I suppose,” he replied.

Despite Curry’s fears that Rocky Horror would leave him typecast as a performer only comfortable on the fringe, there were no shortage of offers.

Onstage, he played the Romanian poet and performance artist Tristan Tzara in the 1975 London and Broadway productions of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and was the Pirate King in a 1982 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance in London’s West End.

He was the bard Will Shakespeare in a 1978 miniseries on Britain’s ITV network and the evil shape-shifter Pennywise in the 1990 ABC miniseries It based on a Stephen King novel.

In movies, he was the grifter Rooster Hannigan in the film adaptation of Annie (1982) and a European villain in Congo (1995), a big-budget dud about diamond hunters in the jungle.

He released a debut album Read My Lips in 1978 and had some US radio play the following year with the single I Do the Rock, which reached No. 91 on the Billboard Hot 100. (The lyrics by Curry splice in some esoteric literary and artistic references that include a nod to the English poet Edith Sitwell, a patron and ally of gay artists after World War I.)

Curry called offbeat roles his forte, using his pliable features to full effect.

In Spamalot, directed by Mike Nichols, Curry impressed audiences and critics as the king on a barmy quest based on the 1975 film spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Even as the show’s crown-wearing straight man, Curry excelled at channelling the Python silliness.

“His stalwart, plummy-voiced Arthur wears a smile as inflexible as armour,” New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley wrote, “and it deflects any suggestion that this manly king is in on the show’s jokes.”

Vocal training

Timothy James Curry was born in Grappenhall, midway between Manchester and Liverpool, on April 19, 1946, and spent much of his early childhood in Plymouth on England’s south-west coast.

His father was a Royal Navy chaplain, and his mother was a school secretary. After his father’s death in 1958, the family moved to London. Curry showed promise as a vocalist, developing in his teens from a soprano to a powerful baritone.

Just before joining the cast of Hair, Curry was at London’s Palace Theatre watching Judi Dench play the ’20s flapper Sally Bowles in Cabaret.

Curry recalled that he turned to a friend and whispered: “That’s what I want to be.” (Thirty-eight years later, he was on the Palace stage in 2006 for the London production of Spamalot.)

His film roles included a Soviet submarine medical officer in The Hunt for Red October (1990), a rogue telecoms chief in the movie Charlie’s Angels (2000) and a member of a sex research team in the biographical film Kinsey (2004). As a voice actor, he received a Daytime Emmy Award as Captain Hook in the animated series Fox’s Peter Pan & the Pirates (1990-91).

He moved to Southern California in the late 1980s because “that’s where they point cameras at you. And that’s what I’d like them to do,” he told the New York Times.

In April 2012, Curry appeared in the role of the Reverend Whoopsie in Idle’s dysfunctional family parody What About Dick? in Los Angeles. That summer, Curry had a major stroke that left him facing years of physical and speech therapy.

He returned to the public eye in 2016, playing the criminologist who narrates Rocky Horror in a Fox television remake, The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, with transgender actress Laverne Cox in the lead role.

At a 2020 table reading of the show, an event to raise funds for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, Curry was again Dr Frank ‘N’ Furter.

Curry never married and leaves no immediate survivors.

When Curry spoke with younger journalists about Rocky Horror, he often reminded them of the far-more conservative social climate in Britain in 1973 as the show reached the London stage.

Curry noted that the play opened in London on a stormy night. “Lots of thunder and lightning,” he once said. “It worked wonderfully for the play. Either the Lord was on our side or else he was terribly displeased.”