A Farewell to Tim Curry

There are actors you admire, actors you respect, and then there are actors who seem to have been put on this earth simply to make watching films more fun. For me, Tim Curry was very much in the third category.

Tim Curry, one of the great character actors of his generation, has died aged 80. He passed away at his home in Los Angeles on 25 August 2026, no cause of death has been disclosed.

It is difficult to think of another actor who could bring quite the same combination of theatricality, intelligence, wicked humour and sheer eccentricity to virtually everything he did. Curry could play sinister, camp, funny, charming, ridiculous, threatening and wonderfully over-the-top and sometimes all within the same performance.

Born Timothy James Curry on 19 April 1946 in Grappenhall, Cheshire. His father, James Curry, was a Methodist chaplain in the Royal Navy, while his mother, Maura, was a school secretary. After finishing school in 1968 he landed his first professional role in the original London production of Hair.

In 1973, Curry auditioned for Richard O’Brien’s outrageous new musical The Rocky Horror Show. He won the role of Dr Frank-N-Furter, reportedly auditioning with Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”, and the part became the defining performance of his career. Two years later came the movie version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

It is impossible to overstate just how important Curry’s Frank-N-Furter became. Curry’s performance was right at its centre. He was outrageous, seductive, funny, threatening and completely unforgettable.

For me, one of the joys of being a Tim Curry fan was never knowing quite what version of him you were going to get. After Frank-N-Furter came Johnny LaGuardia in Times Square, a wonderfully eccentric performance that demonstrated that Curry could dominate a film without necessarily being its conventional leading man.

There was Wadsworth in Clue, perhaps one of the greatest comic performances in a film packed with great comic performances. Curry plays the apparently straight-laced butler with precisely the right mixture of dignity, suspicion and barely concealed hysteria. Clue wasn’t too well received when it was first released, however, it has become a cult favourite over the years, and Curry is one of the biggest reasons why.

Then there was Legend, where he went in completely the opposite direction and became Ridley Scott’s Lord of Darkness. Covered in elaborate make-up and prosthetics, Curry created an extraordinary physical presence that was simultaneously terrifying and theatrical.

His Soviet submarine medical officer Dr Petrov in The Hunt for Red October is a perfect example. It isn’t a huge role, but Curry gives it the kind of personality that makes you immediately notice him.

He was the original Pennywise in the miniseries or It, and a fun villain in the hghly underappreciated The Shadow. Then there was Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers, Mr Jigsaw in National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1, the concierge in Home Alone 2, and Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, this latter film he later recalled as one of the happiest sets he had ever worked on.

And I have a few guilty pleasures. I am quite happy to admit that I have a soft spot for Congo and McHale’s Navy. Curry was clearly having a ball in both, and that’s often enough for me. Congo in particular is a wonderfully silly piece of mid-’90s blockbuster nonsense, and seeing Curry in two Bruce Campbell movies only makes it more enjoyable.

Curry himself was perfectly aware that Congo wasn’t exactly high art. In fact, he later joked that he deserved the Razzie nomination he received for the film. That’s another thing I always liked about him: there was very little sense that he took himself too seriously.

One aspect of Curry’s career that deserves far more attention is his work in video games. He was the original voice of Gabriel Knight in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, bringing the character the same combination of intelligence, sarcasm and theatrical personality that he brought to his screen roles. Curry himself spoke enthusiastically about voice work and the opportunity it gave him to reach different audiences.

But for me, his greatest video-game performance might be one of his funniest. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. As Soviet Premier Anatoly Cherdenko, a game that is deliberately ridiculous, and Curry understood the assignment perfectly. His performance is huge, flamboyant and gloriously hammy. 

He was an accomplished stage actor, earning three Tony nominations for Amadeus, My Favorite Year and Spamalot. Digging further into his work, he was also an enormously prolific voice performer, winning a Daytime Emmy for Captain Hook in Peter Pan & the Pirates and lending his distinctive voice to animation, audiobooks and games, and there was an extraordinary range to the work.

In July 2012, Curry suffered a major stroke. It was a devastating event that left him with significant mobility problems and ultimately dependent on a wheelchair. He spent years undergoing physical and speech therapy and faced a completely different way of living.

But the stroke did not end his career. He continued to work, particularly in voice acting, appeared at conventions and continued to engage with his enormous fanbase. He returned to Rocky Horror in the 2016 television production, playing the Criminologist Dr Scott, and in 2020 took part in a benefit reading of The Rocky Horror Show, once again stepping into the shoes of Frank-N-Furter.

In 2025 he published his memoir, Vagabond, looking back over an extraordinary life and career, and perhaps that is the best way to remember him. Not as somebody whose career ended when illness struck, but as somebody who adapted, continued creating and remained Tim Curry.

Rest in peace Tim.