Tim Curry, the British actor who made being evil look hilariously good fun, has died aged 80. ANN MASSEY McELROY pays tribute to the British acting legend
Tim Curry, one of Britain’s most distinctive and beloved actors and an enduring icon of horror and cult cinema, has died aged 80.
For those of us on the spooky side of the British Isles, Curry was rather special.
Long before Hollywood knew quite what to do with him, this side of the Atlantic had already produced something gloriously difficult to categorise.
Tim Curry was an actor with impeccable theatrical instincts, an extraordinary voice, wicked comic timing and the ability to make the macabre seem simultaneously frightening and enormous fun – England’s Vincent Price.
Born Timothy James Curry in Grappenhall, Cheshire, on 19 April 1946, Curry was the son of Royal Navy chaplain James Curry and school secretary Patricia.
He studied English and Drama at the University of Birmingham. He then embarked on a theatrical career that would eventually take him from the British stage to Hollywood and into the nightmares of millions.
Yet, however, international his career became, there was something wonderfully British about Curry’s particular brand of darkness. It was theatrical rather than slick. Gothic rather than merely gruesome.
Frequently absurd, occasionally camp and delivered with the absolute conviction that the sinister and the ridiculous could coexist perfectly happily. British horror had been doing precisely that for years. And then along came Tim Curry.
A British cult icon is born
Before Pennywise, before Darkness and before Hollywood, there was a small theatre in London and a very strange musical.
Curry originated the role of Dr Frank-N-Furter in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show when it opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1973.
It is worth remembering just how British the beginnings of what became a worldwide cult phenomenon actually were.
Rocky Horror grew from Britain’s love affair with Hammer horror, old science-fiction serials, Gothic castles, mad scientists and B-movies – filtered through early-1970s counterculture and Richard O’Brien’s gloriously anarchic imagination.
And at its centre stood a young British actor from Cheshire in stockings, suspenders and pearls. Curry’s Frank-N-Furter was outrageous, seductive, dangerous and magnificently theatrical.
When The Rocky Horror Picture Show followed in 1975, the film initially struggled before developing into the extraordinary midnight-screening phenomenon it remains today. Curry became an international cult star, with a character born on a London stage.
One of cinema’s greatest cult characters was, at heart, a wonderfully British monster.
Pennywise, the British actor who terrified America
There is something particularly satisfying about the fact that one of the most frightening figures in American popular culture was played by a man from Cheshire.
In the 1990 television adaptation of Stephen King’s IT, Curry became Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the smiling face adopted by the ancient entity haunting Derry, Maine.
For an entire generation, he ruined clowns. Network television restricted how much graphic horror IT could show, so Curry had to create much of the terror himself – and he did it brilliantly.
His Pennywise could appear almost friendly. He joked, teased and grinned in a horrific, yet amusing way.He teased.Then something changed. The slightest change in glance, movement and a shift in Curry’s voice brought forth something ancient and profoundly malevolent looking out from behind the clown makeup.
Perhaps Curry’s British theatrical background helped make the performance so effective. He didn’t require elaborate effects to dominate a scene. Voice, face, timing and physical presence did the work.
Decades later, despite a spectacular big-screen reinvention of Pennywise, Curry’s version remains the definitive nightmare for countless horror fans.
Darkness, Legend
Five years before Pennywise, Curry had already become something considerably larger. In Ridley Scott’s 1985 dark fantasy Legend, he played Darkness, a towering red-skinned demonic figure with enormous black horns who seeks to plunge the world into eternal night.
The combination itself was wonderfully British, with a British director, a British actor and the visual traditions of European fairy tale and Gothic fantasy transformed into something extraordinary.
Buried beneath remarkable prosthetics, Curry could easily have disappeared, but instead, he became enormous.His voice rolled through the character. His theatrical physicality made Darkness seem less like a man in makeup and more like something summoned from an old engraving of the Devil.
It remains one of fantasy cinema’s most spectacular demonic creations and beneath the horns and the imposing frame and booming voice was Tim from Cheshire.
The Shout, British folk horror weirdness
Curry’s darker work wasn’t always flamboyant. The deeply strange 1978 film The Shout placed him alongside Alan Bates, John Hurt and Susannah York in a story involving madness, supernatural power and a mysterious traveller who claims he can kill using a terrible shout.
Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and filmed in Devon, The Shout belongs to that wonderfully unsettling hinterland of British cinema where psychological horror, landscape, folklore and ambiguity collide.
Curry’s role as Robert Graves was far removed from the extravagant monsters that would later make him a horror icon, but for admirers of eerie British cinema it remains a fascinating part of his early career.
Tales from the Crypt, Three Currys for the price of one
Tim Curry was practically designed for Tales from the Crypt. In the wonderfully grotesque 1993 episode Death of Some Salesmen, he played not one but three members of the thoroughly disturbing Brackett family – Ma, Pa and their daughter Winona.
Under layers of prosthetics, Curry threw himself into the macabre black comedy of the story, in which an unscrupulous travelling salesman discovers he has selected entirely the wrong isolated house to visit. It was grotesque, funny and revolting.
In other words, perfect Tim Curry territory.
The performance earned him an Emmy nomination and demonstrated again what British audiences had known since Rocky Horror – give Curry something strange and allow him off the leash at your peril.
Anything can happen on Halloween
Then there is The Worst Witch.
Those words alone will already have caused a certain section of British viewers to start singing. Curry played the Grand Wizard in the 1986 television adaptation of Jill Murphy’s much loved British children’s books and delivered one of Halloween television’s most magnificently peculiar musical moments.
Cape billowing, tambourine in hand, Curry performs Anything Can Happen on Halloween with complete and glorious commitment. It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does.
For generations who grew up with British children’s television, The Worst Witch represents another side of Curry’s spooky legacy: not genuinely terrifying, but magical, witchy, eccentric and unmistakably him.Every Halloween, the Grand Wizard flies again.
The Prince of Darkness
Much later in his career, Curry reminded audiences that he didn’t require horns, clown makeup or a corset to be frightening. In Criminal Minds, he played serial killer Billy Flynn, appropriately nicknamed the Prince of Darkness.
Flynn was a home-invading murderer who used rolling blackouts in Los Angeles to terrorise his victims. Curry was almost unrecognisable, but this time the horror came not from elaborate prosthetics or supernatural powers, but from making the character horribly human.
It remains one of his most disturbing performances. The British master of theatrical monsters could do quiet ugliness equally well.
The voice of a horror master
And then, of course, there was the voice. Few actors possessed one quite like it.
Rich, theatrical, mischievous and capable of turning a perfectly ordinary sentence into either a seduction or a threat, Curry’s voice made him a natural choice for decades of villains, monsters and sinister animated characters.
His darker voice roles included Hexxus in FernGully – The Last Rainforest, Skullmaster in Mighty Max and the Goblin King in Scooby-Doo and the Goblin King, among many others.
Even without seeing his face, you knew. Tim Curry had entered the room and something wicked was probably about to happen.
Britain’s magnificent master of the macabre
Curry suffered a major stroke in 2012, which affected his mobility, but continued working, particularly through voice performances, and remained connected with the enormous international community of fans his work had created.
His career, of course, extended far beyond horror. There was Clue, Annie, Home Alone 2, Muppet Treasure Island, Spamalot, countless television appearances, theatre, music and voice work.
Curry belonged to a particularly British tradition of performers who understood that darkness need not be po-faced. He showed us that Gothic can be funny, grotesque can be beautiful and a villain can be terrifying while having an absolutely marvellous time.
Tim Curry carried that eccentric, theatrical British darkness around the world. He made generations laugh, shudder and, in the case of Pennywise, develop a perfectly reasonable lifelong distrust of drains and clowns. There will never be another quite like him.
So here at Spooky Isles, we raise a glass to one of Britain’s great masters of the macabre.
Actor, singer, mad scientist, demon, grand wizard and Prince of Darkness.
Tim Curry, 1946–2026.
Britain’s darkness just became considerably less fabulous.
