Let’s Remember When Tim Curry Played A Huge Scary Red Guy

The actor Tim Curry died on Tuesday. He was 80. He was as purely and consistently fun a screen presence as anyone else I can think of, a cartoon of a performer, with outrageous charisma and the ability to communicate it through a wild assortment of constraints: obscuring makeup, heavy prosthetics, voice acting, shitty scripts, amateurish productions, small roles. When Tim Curry was in something, it had at least one delightful and magnetic thing in it. Curry most famously portrayed Dr. Frank-N-Furter in 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, after having substantially created the character in Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show stage production. It's tempting to call this his breakout role—it's incredibly famous now, and it was his debut film performance—but Rocky Horror wasn't a hit on its initial release, and nearly a decade elapsed before Curry landed anything like a starring screen role again. Later, among a ton of other credits, he played Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the 1990 TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It; and Wadsworth the butler, roughly 90 percent of what makes 1985's Clue worth watching; and Long John Silver in 1996's Muppet Treasure Island, a performance that earned him honorary Muppethood. Among a crazy number of stage credits, he portrayed Mozart when the play Amadeus came to Broadway and received a Tony nomination for it. But Frank-N-Furter will always be the role with which he is most closely associated. Curry's performance in Rocky Horror is astounding. He is by miles the funniest thing in a movie that also includes O'Brien's singing and dancing as Riff Raff during the "Time Warp" sequence, which sends me into convulsions even now that I've seen it probably close to 15 times. He is by miles the sexiest thing in a movie that features an all but totally undressed Susan Sarandon begging a fully lubed-up Peter Hinwood to fuck her. He is by far the most energetic and unhinged musical performer in a movie that features Meat Loaf with brain-surgery stitches around his forehead screaming the phrase "Hot patootie!" roughly 200 times while driving a motorcycle in a circle. You cannot take your eyes off of him during any moment he is on the screen. It rightly, if belatedly, made Curry a legend.

Read it at Defector ↗

← Front page