There Was Nobody Else Like Tim Curry

I was terrified of Tim Curry before I really knew who Tim Curry was.

For me, it started with Legend. Curry’s Darkness was horrifying when I was younger. The horns, the size of him, that voice, that face — everything about the character felt enormous and evil in a way that burned itself into my brain. He didn’t look like an actor buried underneath prosthetics and makeup. He looked like the Devil had shown up for work.

Then I saw him as Pennywise in the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s It, and somehow he did it to me again.

Pennywise stuck because Curry was completely transformative. There are actors you recognize underneath a costume, no matter how elaborate it gets. You still see the actor performing the character. Curry had this ability to disappear inside one. Watching It, I wasn’t thinking about the guy who played Darkness. I was watching Pennywise, this smiling, taunting, absolutely vicious thing lurking behind the clown makeup. That performance became one of the defining images of the character long before another actor ever put on the suit.

Now Tim Curry is gone.

Curry died Wednesday at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, at 80. His longtime manager and friend Marcia Hurwitz confirmed his death. No cause was announced. Curry had suffered a major stroke in 2012 that affected his mobility, but he continued working and making appearances afterward.

Trying to explain what made Curry special by pointing to one role is almost impossible, because everybody seems to have a different Tim Curry.

Maybe yours is Pennywise. Maybe it’s Darkness. Maybe it’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Maybe it’s Wadsworth running around Hill House trying to keep track of an increasingly ridiculous number of bodies in Clue. Maybe it’s Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. Maybe it’s the concierge in Home Alone 2. I doubt it, but maybe. Maybe you only knew the voice and didn’t even realize how many times Tim Curry had been hiding in your childhood.

Mine covers a pretty wide range.

At some point after being traumatized by Darkness and Pennywise, I went to a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and got a proper spanking onstage.

Rocky Horror is probably where any serious discussion of Curry has to eventually land, because Frank-N-Furter wasn’t simply another memorable performance. Curry originated the character in the stage production of The Rocky Horror Show in London in 1973 before carrying him into the 1975 film. What initially stumbled at the box office eventually became one of the great cult phenomena in movie history, fueled by midnight screenings where audiences shouted at the screen, dressed as the characters and turned watching the movie into an event. Curry’s performance sits right in the middle of all of it.

Frank could be hilarious, seductive, arrogant, threatening and strangely vulnerable, all within the same scene. Curry understood exactly how far to push everything without losing control of it. There was always something theatrical about him, but theatrical never meant fake. Even at his biggest, Curry committed so completely that the characters felt real inside whatever strange world they inhabited.

That’s probably why Clue works as well as it does. And really, how can you not love Clue? Curry’s Wadsworth is surrounded by one of the greatest comedy ensembles ever assembled — Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Lesley Ann Warren, Martin Mull and Eileen Brennan — and somehow he becomes the engine driving the entire thing. By the time he launches into that frantic final reconstruction of the murders, racing through rooms and reenacting half the movie himself, Curry is operating at a speed that should be impossible without the whole performance falling apart. Instead, it gets funnier the faster he goes.

That kind of control is easy to miss when somebody makes it look effortless.

Then there’s FernGully: The Last Rainforest, because physically appearing in the movie wasn’t even necessary for Curry to take it over. As Hexxus, Curry is basically voicing pollution itself, and of course he turns that into a performance people still remember more than three decades later. That voice was one of his greatest weapons. Curry spent years working in animation, video games and audiobooks, winning a Daytime Emmy for voicing Captain Hook in Peter Pan and the Pirates. His voice credits eventually stretched across projects including The Wild Thornberrys, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and plenty more.

That’s the problem with trying to write about Tim Curry. Every time you think you have the list covered, another one comes flying out of nowhere.

Annie. Muppet Treasure Island. Home Alone 2. Congo. The Three Musketeers. Spamalot. Amadeus. His music. His voice work. Three Tony nominations. A career that moved between stage, movies, television, animation and music without ever feeling like he belonged exclusively to any one of them. There are simply too many to name.

That's one of the most remarkable things about him. Most actors would be lucky to create one character that survives them. Tim Curry created a handful that became permanent pieces of pop culture, and they barely resemble one another.

Darkness is not Pennywise. Pennywise is not Frank-N-Furter. Frank is certainly not Wadsworth. Wadsworth isn’t Long John Silver, and none of them are Hexxus. The voice changes. The body language changes. The energy changes. Sometimes even Curry himself seems to disappear.

Yet every one of them belongs completely to him.

I started out scared of Tim Curry. Then he scared me again. Eventually he made me laugh, gave us Rocky Horror, and helped make Clue a movie that has spanned generations.

And somewhere along the way I got spanked onstage because of one of his movies.

That’s a pretty remarkable legacy.