Tim Curry was nothing short of cinematic dynamite.
Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien and Clue writer-director Jonathan Lynn recalled how the extraordinary actor, who died Wednesday at 80, transformed the mad, cross-dressing scientist Frank-N-Furter — and butler-with-a-secret Wadsworth — into performances for the ages.
Curry’s entrance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains one of the great movie-star reveals. After descending in a metal cage elevator, Riff Raff removes his cape, revealing Frank-N-Furter in a corset, fishnets and pearls.
Before Curry sings a note, the film belongs to him.
Richard O’Brien, who created The Rocky Horror Show and played Riff Raff in its stage and screen incarnations, was not present for the moment Curry became Frank-N-Furter.
As O’Brien recalled on a 2023 episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast, the casting happened with an almost appropriate air of inevitability.
O’Brien had known Curry from their days performing together onstage in Hair. Years later, while O’Brien was developing Rocky Horror, the two ran into each other outside a London gym where O’Brien had been scouting muscular men for the show.
“We nattered away, and he asked me what I was doing,” O’Brien recalled. “I told him, and off he went.”
Curry happened to be appearing in a play at the same theater where Rocky Horror rehearsed during the day. He tried out for the role while O’Brien was elsewhere.
“I wasn’t there when he auditioned,” O’Brien said. “When I came back from wherever I was, he was Frank. I can’t give you any more than that.”
The decision was not O’Brien’s, he acknowledged, but its significance would become impossible to overstate. Curry didn’t simply play Frank-N-Furter; he established the character’s entire vocabulary of seduction, danger, comedy and camp, delivering every lyric and raised eyebrow with absolute conviction.
The performance was outrageous without ever feeling unserious. Curry understood that the joke only worked if Frank believed completely in his own magnificence.
Looking back half a century later, O’Brien credited Curry with much of Rocky Horror’s astonishing longevity.
“I’ve really got to be most grateful to Tim Curry,” he said. “I often think, if it had been anybody other than Tim, I wonder whether it would have had the legs that it’s had.”
Curry’s performance was never going to be the sort customarily recognized by the Academy, but it was Oscar-worthy nonetheless. On every level, he delivered a performance for the ages, one that could be imitated endlessly but never duplicated.
Ten years after Rocky Horror, Curry once again arrived at a forbidding mansion on a rainy night, this time as the tightly wound butler Wadsworth in Clue. The 1985 comedy initially failed with critics and audiences, only to become another Curry-led cult phenomenon through cable television and home video.
Its writer-director, Jonathan Lynn, had known Curry even longer than O’Brien had. They attended the same strict English boys’ school, founded for the sons of Methodist ministers. Lynn was 14 when Curry was 12.
They were not close friends at school, Lynn recalled on It Happened in Hollywood earlier this year. But years later, Curry came to see Lynn perform in an acclaimed play at the Edinburgh Festival and told him that Lynn’s career had helped inspire his own.
“He said to me some years later that he became an actor because I had become an actor, and that it sort of showed it was possible,” Lynn said.
When Curry was suggested for Wadsworth, Lynn immediately recognized the possibilities.
“I thought it was a brilliant idea,” he recalled.
It proved essential. Wadsworth begins Clue as the seemingly subservient servant before gradually taking command of the entire picture.
In its breathless finale, Curry races through the mansion reconstructing every murder, flinging himself through doors and corridors while maintaining the verbal precision of a stage actor performing at double speed.
“He really holds the whole film together,” I told Lynn.
“He really does,” Lynn replied. “He’s wonderful.”
Lynn was reluctant to take credit for extracting the performance from Curry. A director could nudge an actor one way or another, he explained, but the essential work had to come from the performer.
“You’ve got to have a really talented actor to start with,” Lynn said. “And Tim was extraordinary.”
That may be the simplest explanation for Curry’s singular place in film history. He could enter material that appeared too strange, theatrical or unruly to endure and give it absolute coherence.
Whether teetering across a laboratory in platform heels or sprinting through a mansion while explaining multiple murders, he committed so completely that audiences had no choice but to follow him.
Rocky Horror and Clue were initially misunderstood, then rediscovered and finally passed from one generation of devoted fans to the next. Both films had wonderful ensembles, ingenious writing and an unmistakable sense of occasion.
But at the center of each was Tim Curry, opening the door and inviting everyone inside.
