Tim Curry, star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, dies aged 80

“I’m very aware that I’m lucky,” Tim Curry said just last year. “I’m astonished actually at how ambitious I’ve been.”Curry, who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 80, will have known that obituaries would lead with his delightfully camp performance as Dr Frank-N-Furter – a self-described “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” – in Richard O’Brien’s indestructible Rocky Horror Picture Show from 1975. Towering in Victorian corset and fishnet stockings, he became a powerful symbol of new sexual flexibilities. Decades after the film’s release, audiences were still dressing up to shout back the dialogue at the Classic Cinema in Harold’s Cross, south Dublin. They were doing the same in New York, Rio and Barcelona.The role did not, however, imprison him. Curry built on the steady success of Rocky Horror – it took a while to make a profit – with a lucrative line in treacle-voiced screen villains and challenging theatrical roles. Fans of the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s It still chill at his queasy take on the malign clown Pennywise. He relished the opportunity to play Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. “They’re my favourites, actually,” he said of the Muppets. “You come to see them as characters and not as puppets, which is down to the brilliance of the Muppeteers. I loved Miss Piggy. We got on great.” He received one of his three Tony nominations for playing the title role in the first Broadway production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in 1980. Few actors managed to be such a welcome presence in such a wide array of contrasting productions. With that rumbling timbre and ambiguous charisma, he was born to occupy the biggest stage and the widest screen.READ MORETim Curry was born in Cheshire to a school secretary mum and a Royal Navy chaplain dad. One can imagine the younger Curry preaching sermons with gusto. “I’m not particularly God-fearing, but I respect it very much,” he said. His father’s job took the family from port to port until his early death in 1958. After excelling as a boy soprano, Curry turned to acting and took a degree in English and drama at Birmingham University.He emerged at an exciting time for an actor. He was part of the original cast of the hippie musical Hair where he bumped into a young eccentric called Richard O’Brien. “He gave me the script and I thought, ‘boy, if this works, it’s going to be a smash’,” Curry said of The Rocky Horror Show. So it eventually transpired. The original stage show challenged contemporary mores, but never forgot to shape its messages around a good tune.Curry, who never married and had no children, was busy ever after. During the hectic years he became a cocaine user, but managed to shake the drug without too much difficulty. In 2012, then 67, he suffered a severe stroke that left him paralysed down the left side. “It was a trying time and still is,” he said in 2025. “I’m still in recovery, partly because I’m having difficulties dealing with the wheelchair.”He died as an irreplaceable original.