Tim Curry, who created Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show at the Royal Court in 1973 and was three times nominated for a Tony, has died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 80.
Tim Curry, the actor who created Dr Frank-N-Furter and then spent fifty years declining to be reduced to him, died on Tuesday night at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles. He was 80. His manager and publicist confirmed the death. No cause has been given, and he had lived since 2012 with the effects of a major stroke.
A statement issued by the publicist Sean Katz, on behalf of Curry's longtime manager and friend Marcia Hurwitz, said: "Though widely known for his inimitable, flamboyant characters and colorful stage performances, his greatest legacies to those who knew him were his curious, expansive mind and generous, gentle heart, both of which remained open and filled with anticipation until his final breath."
He was born in Grappenhall, Cheshire, on 19 April 1946, and came out of the University of Birmingham in 1968 with a degree in English and drama. The job he walked into was the original London company of Hair, and it was there that he met Richard O'Brien - the encounter the rest of his career turned on.
O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show opened upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre on 19 June 1973, booked for a few weeks in a room seating fewer than a hundred people. Curry played Frank-N-Furter in corset and fishnets, the production ran on in London for 2,960 performances, and it took that year's Evening Standard award for best musical. He carried the part to Los Angeles, then to Broadway, and then into the 1975 film, which is where most of the world met him and where a good deal of the rest of his work was subsequently overlooked.
That work was more various than the cult reputation suggests. He was Tristan Tzara in Travesties on Broadway in 1975 and Mozart in Amadeus in 1980, which brought the first of his three Tony nominations. In London in 1982 he played the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, earning an Olivier nomination and the Royal Variety Club's stage actor of the year. He led the American tour of Me and My Girl, was nominated again for My Favorite Year in 1992, and closed the sequence as King Arthur in Spamalot - Chicago first, Broadway from February 2005, and the West End until January 2007 - which brought a third Tony nomination and a second Olivier nomination.
The stroke came in July 2012. It required brain surgery and left him using a wheelchair, with lasting difficulties of movement and memory, and it effectively ended his stage career at 66. He kept working where the work could come to him, largely in voice roles, and his last screen appearance was in the 2016 television remake of Rocky Horror. In October 2020 he returned to Frank-N-Furter one final time, in a filmed table reading.
More than half a century after that first run in a hundred-seat room, The Rocky Horror Show is still touring, and it is still built around the character he invented.
