Tim Curry

Timothy James Curry was born in Cheshire in the spring of 1946. His father was a chaplain in the Royal Navy and his mother a school secretary. That family environment gave no hint of the explosion of color and provocation Curry would unleash years later on the London stage.

He began his training at the University of Birmingham, where he studied Drama and English Philology. In 1968, he landed his first professional role in the musical Hair. It was during that production that he met Richard O'Brien, and that chance encounter changed the course of contemporary pop culture.

The die was cast.

The Makeup as Armor

In 1973, Curry first put on the corset and fishnet stockings of Frank-N-Furter for the premiere of The Rocky Horror Show in a small London theater. The production cost barely 4,000 pounds of the time, but the impact was immediate. The audience was not ready for a cross-dressing scientist who mixed B-movie horror with glam rock.

But the decisive breakthrough came in 1975 with the film adaptation. The movie was a total flop on its commercial release. It only survived thanks to the midnight screenings in New York, where fans began interacting with the screen. Curry always kept a careful distance from the fan phenomenon to keep the character from devouring the actor.

In 1985, Ridley Scott called him to play the Lord of Darkness in Legend. The makeup process was a technical ordeal. He had to sit for six hours a day while latex prosthetics and glue were applied across his torso. To remove the makeup at the end of the day, he had to soak in a solvent bath for an hour.

The audience was not ready for that.

And it's true that Curry always preferred roles that hid his real face. In 1990, he took on the challenge of playing Pennywise in the miniseries It, based on the novel by Stephen King. His performance as the killer clown was built without digital effects. Everything depended on his fixed stare and a laugh he recorded at several frequencies to unsettle the viewer.

Reinventing Himself After Silence

Throughout the 1990s, Curry became the go-to villain for casting directors. He appeared in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in 1992 and in Muppet Treasure Island in 1996. In the latter, he played Long John Silver with an overflowing energy that overshadowed Jim Henson's own Muppets.

But his work pace came to an abrupt halt in July 2012. Curry suffered a severe stroke at his home in Los Angeles that left him with permanent mobility loss. Since then, he has used a wheelchair to get around, and his public appearances have dropped sharply.

So he focused on dubbing and voice work. His baritone voice remained intact, which allowed him to keep landing animation and video game projects. Between 2012 and 2014, he voiced Darth Sidious in the series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, replacing Ian Abercrombie.

In 2021, he took part in the documentary Pennywise: The Story of IT to discuss his creative process three decades after the premiere. Despite his physical limitations, he remained as lucid as ever as he explained the technicalities of acting under latex. Curry never sought the audience's sympathy, but rather respect for his craft.

In 2020, he received the lifetime achievement award from The Actors Fund for decades of uninterrupted work. The ceremony was held virtually due to global health restrictions. That year, the actor gave a live reading of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to raise funds for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.