Thank you, Tim Curry
This one is bit emotional for me, so allow me to pre-apologize if any of this sounds goofy or silly. There have been a lot of tears today.
Sometimes you get lucky as a fan and you connect with a performer who somehow becomes part of the story of your life, and Tim Curry was that kind of actor for me. He wasn't simply someone whose movies I loved or whose performances I admired from a distance. He was there at the very beginning of my life as a movie obsessive, and somehow he kept showing up at different points along the way, becoming more important to me over time time.
Sure, I grew up watching Annie on repeat (he and Carol Burnett made a perfect pair) but it was in 1986 when Clue and Legend introduced me to two wildly different sides of the same extraordinary performer. I was still very young, but I knew immediately that there was something special about him. Then, at 10 years old, I discovered The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and suddenly this actor I already loved became something else entirely. A few years later, IT would make him one of the most terrifying performers I'd ever seen, which was a feat considering I thought I was "above" being scared by horror movies and he just kept popping up in so many movies, shows and games where it just felt like Tim Curry would always be there.
Decades after that, during one of the most difficult periods of my adult life, the words Tim Curry delivered as Frank-N-Furter became a mantra I quite literally carried with me and just a short time later, one of his movies would become part of the story of how I met the love of my life. Like so many other fans out there, Tim Curry's work became so deeply embedded in who I am, and now we have to say goodbye to this man who could literally do it all.
While Rooster Hannigan may have been a big part of my early years, it was Tim Curry's performance as Wadsworth that left an immediate imprint on my psyche. It was in 1986 when I first rented Clue and it became one of those movies I just could not stop watching. I was an obsessive child, and if I loved something, I didn't simply like it – I endlessly consumed it (much to the chagrin of my friends). The three movies I grew up particularly addicted to were Clue, Fright Night and Terror in the Aisles, which probably tells you almost everything you need to know about the kind of kid I was. But I was already gravitating toward movies that were theatrical, funny, macabre and larger than life at a very young age, and Clue somehow managed to put all of those things into one glorious package. And at the center of it was Tim Curry.
What Curry did as Wadsworth was my first real glimpse of the performer he could be. I didn't have the vocabulary to articulate it at the time (and I don't even know if I have it now), but I understood that he was different. There was a precision to everything he did. The timing, the physical comedy, the voice, the expressions, the way he could move from restrained propriety to barely contained panic — it all felt completely effortless. Wadsworth was the perfect center of gravity for an ensemble filled with enormous personalities, and Curry understood exactly how to play him without ever being swallowed by the rest of the cast in Clue. He didn't need to be flamboyant in the way Frank-N-Furter would later be (once I finally discovered him, that is). He could make an eyebrow raise funny. He could turn a pause into a punchline. He could command a scene simply by standing in it.
That very same year, I was also introduced to Legend, Ridley Scott's dark fantasy, and that gave me a completely different Tim Curry experience. As Darkness, he was buried beneath extraordinary prosthetic makeup (shout out to the genius Rob Bottin!), towering horns and hooves, and a transformation that could easily have reduced a lesser performer to nothing more than a collection of makeup effects. But Tim Curry did the opposite. He made Darkness feel alive. His voice became an instrument all its own, and he brought an almost operatic quality to the character's seduction and menace. Darkness wasn't simply a monster in Legend, he was charismatic, playful, theatrical, and dangerous. It was evident that Curry could make evil fascinating (something he did several more times in his career).
But I think that was the first lesson Tim Curry taught me as a performer, although I certainly didn't understand it in those terms at the time: never assume you know what an actor is capable of based on the last thing you saw them do. And what's really cool is that I didn't even realize it at the time, but Curry was giving me an early education in what versatility could actually look like.
And then, when I was 10 years old, I was introduced to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. By that point, I already knew Tim Curry. I already loved Tim Curry. What I didn't yet know was that he had a performance in him that would stay with me for the rest of my life because Frank-N-Furter was unlike anything I had ever seen (and probably unlike anything I have ever seen since, too).
Maybe I was a bit young, but in my eyes, I felt like I was probably the perfect age to encounter Rocky Horror because I didn't have the vocabulary yet to understand exactly what I was seeing. I only knew that this person on the screen was completely unlike anyone I had ever encountered before. Curry's Frank-N-Furter was glamorous and outrageous, seductive and hilarious, intimidating and vulnerable, completely theatrical and yet somehow entirely human (even though he really wasn't). The performance didn't ask permission to be different – it just simply was different.
More than 50 years after Curry first originated the role onstage, it is easy to reduce Frank-N-Furter to the fishnets, the makeup, the outrageousness, the songs and the imagery that have become synonymous with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But what made Curry so extraordinary was that beneath all of that spectacle was a fully formed character who seemed to understand exactly who he was and had no interest whatsoever in apologizing for it. He wasn't merely playing a transgressive character; he was creating someone who radiated the freedom to exist outside everyone else's expectations.
Obviously, I didn't have the words for any of that when I was kid, I just knew I loved watching Frank. And that love continued in the years to come as I would go out to midnight showings of RHPS throughout high school (I even took my ex on our first date), and it became my activity of choice on the night of my bachelorette party because I am just that cool (all the LOLs).
Eventually, like so many others out there, one particular line from The Rocky Horror Picture Show would become much more than something I loved hearing – it would become my mantra.
"Don't Dream It, Be It."
When I was going through my divorce in 2008/2009 while subsequently embarking on my writing career, this was a time when so much of my life was being dismantled and rebuilt at the same time. During this phase, I did what any self-respecting woman going through a semi-midlife crisis would do: I got a tattoo. But not just any tattoo – I got a tattoo of the lips from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It remains my only tattoo thanks to some skin sensitivity issues that popped up in 2011 during a bout of shingles, but there is something about that decision that makes even more sense to me now than it did then. I wasn't simply putting an image from one of my favorite movies on my body. I was carrying forward a piece of something that had been with me since childhood – a tiny reminder that there is enormous power in refusing to spend your life merely dreaming about who you might become. Sometimes you have to take the risk to actually become that person, and I think Tim Curry's career was built upon that kind of risk.
The obvious shorthand when it comes to Tim Curry's career is Frank-N-Furter, and possibly, the second might be Pennywise. But between those two performances exists an entire universe of Tim Curry: Wadsworth, Darkness, Rooster Hannigan in Annie, the concierge in Home Alone 2, Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, Nigel Thornberry, Captain Hook, King Arthur in Spamalot, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart onstage, and countless other characters across film, television, theater, animation, audiobooks and games. His career encompassed the Royal Shakespeare Company, Broadway, film, television, music and voice acting, with Tony nominations for Amadeus, My Favorite Year and Spamalot, among numerous other honors.
But for me, there was another Tim Curry performance that would come along during my middle school years that would absolutely destroy me in all the best possible ways. When the 1990 television adaptation of Stephen King's IT arrived, I was a horror-loving pre-teen who already knew Curry as one of the most charismatic performers I had ever seen, and while I knew he could be evil, none of that prepared me for Pennywise, and I still think it's the best performance we saw in horror that year.
I think the genius of Tim Curry's performance here was that he never played the character as merely a scary clown. Pennywise was theatrical. He was funny. He was grotesque. He was playful. He could appear to be entertaining one moment and then become something profoundly unnatural the next. When I interviewed makeup effects legend Bart Mixon for my book, he discussed how Tim understood that Pennywise wasn't simply a monster wearing a clown suit, he was the living embodiment of terror (I'll most likely be posting that separately in a few days).
But even though I was old enough to "know better," Tim's performance as Pennywise in IT destroyed me. What was cool was that at that point in my life, it finally hit me just how versatile he really was as an actor. And he still had so much more to give. I love how, regardless of my obsession with horror, my relationship with Tim Curry's work was never limited to his most obvious genre roles, and by the time I was in high school, I had reached the point where seeing his name listed in the credits was enough to get me to the theater. In fact, I remember dragging a few of my friends to see Congo in 1995 because Tim Curry was in it, and I wanted to see what he was going to do (I went alone to The Shadow the year prior). That is the kind of performer he became for me.
And then everything in my life led back to Clue in a completely unexpected way. It was in 2009 when I met my other half, Brian, at a party. Somehow, during the course of that initial conversation, Clue came up. That might sound like a small thing, but at the time it didn't feel small at all. Back then, people didn't talk about Clue the way they do now, as it hadn't yet become the endlessly quoted and celebrated cult classic that it is today.
So when I discovered that this person standing across from me knew and loved the movie too, it was an immediate connection for both of us, because neither of us knew anyone else who loved Clue the way that we did. And of all the things we could have talked about at that party, somehow we found our way to Tim Curry and Clue. I gave him a Clue poster for his birthday that year, and today, there is now a Clue-themed hallway outside of our bedroom.
This is what happens when two people who love a movie find each other, as eventually, the movie starts occupying physical space in your life, too. It becomes part of your shared history. It becomes an inside joke, a piece of décor, a shorthand for something you both understand. So when I think about Tim Curry's Wadsworth now, I don't just remember the child who watched Clue obsessively. I think about the person I met because we happened to love the same movie. And that is the strange thing about the movies we love when we are young – we don't know what they are going to mean to us later.
When I first watched Clue, I couldn't possibly have known that Tim Curry's performance would eventually be connected to one of the most important relationships of my life. When I discovered The Rocky Horror Picture Show at 10, I couldn't have known that nearly forty years later I would carry its most important message on my personage. We don't get to choose which pieces of art will follow us through our lives. Sometimes, they simply choose us. And sometimes an actor becomes so intertwined with those memories that it becomes difficult to separate the performer from the person you were when you encountered the performance, and Tim Curry was that actor for me.
And so today, I don't want to say goodbye to Tim Curry as though the most important thing about him is that he is gone. I want to celebrate the fact that he was here. I want to celebrate the audacity of Frank-N-Furter, the precision of Wadsworth, the grandeur of Darkness, the terror of Pennywise and every other strange, funny, frightening, flamboyant, unexpected character he brought into our lives for more than 50 years.
But most of all, I want to celebrate what Tim Curry gave people permission to do.
To be different.
To take risks.
To find joy in the strange things that make us who we are.
To stop waiting for permission to become ourselves.
I still have those lips tattooed on my body, I still have a handful of reminders of Clue in my home, and I still carry these movies I loved as a kid with me every single day. And I still believe in those fvie words that Tim Curry delivered to me decades ago that I had no idea that I would always need to be reminded of:
Don't Dream It, Be It.
Tim Curry spent his entire career doing exactly that, and, in ways he could never have known, he taught me – and countless others – to do the same.
If you'd like to read my 2015 celebration of Clue, you can find it HERE.
