Tim Curry, Star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Has Died at 80

Tim Curry, the British actor whose Dr. Frank-N-Furter turned a small London stage musical into The Rocky Horror Picture Show and 50 years of cult fandom, died Tuesday night at his Los Angeles home at the age of 80, TMZ reports. Curry suffered a major stroke in 2012 that left him partially paralyzed; an official cause of death has not been released.

Curry, who was born in 1946 in Cheshire, England, studied drama at the University of Birmingham before landing his first professional acting role in a 1968 West End production of Hair. Through the production, he met Richard O'Brien, who was writing a sci-fi musical that would later become Rocky Horror. Curry auditioned with Little Richard's “Tutti Frutti” and got the part of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a corset- and fishnet-wearing mad scientist from Transsexual, Transylvania, who seduces a stranded, buttoned-up couple over the course of one very long night.

The Rocky Horror Show opened in London in 1973 and reached Broadway in 1975, the same year Curry starred alongside Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick in the musical's film adaptation. The movie, at first, was a flop. In a 2025 CBS Sunday Morning interview, Curry said of the original release, "It died a death. It was a failure. And I was crushed."

Eventually, though, Rocky Horror became a cult classic hit and the center of its own devoted subculture. Curry, suddenly famous, found himself inside a celebrity world he would later chronicle in his 2025 memoir Vagabond, with encounters with David Bowie and nights at Studio 54 alongside Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, and Carly Simon. To this day, at midnight showings of the film, theatergoers dress up as their favorite characters and perform monologues, dances, and songs like “Time Warp” and Curry’s “Sweet Transvestite.”

After Rocky Horror, he enjoyed a varied career alternating between playing memorable villains, like the evil clown Pennywise in a hugely popular 1990 ABC television adaptation of Stephen King’s It, and more comedic roles like Wadsworth the butler in 1985’s Clue, in which Curry led an ensemble cast of iconic actors including Christopher Lloyd and Madeline Kahn. By the end of his career, Curry had acting credits in roughly 126 movies and feature films, making him the sort of omnipresent figure that feels like part of the very fabric of pop culture.

In 1982, he starred alongside Carol Burnett as the sleazy con artist Rooster Hannigan in Annie; in 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, he played the meddling concierge at the hotel where Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) stays; in 1996, he played pirate Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island, and in 2000, he played a foil to Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu in the first Charlie’s Angels film.

Of his penchant for playing villains, Curry told The Guardian in a 2025 interview, “I’ve always tried to make them amusing, which gives them a bit more edge. It’s like people being drawn to the scene of a car crash. They’re drawn to extreme behavior…I think people secretly long to be a bit more explosive or act out much more.”

Curry returned to the stage several times, earning three Best Actor Tony nominations, including in 1981 for originating the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus, playing fictional actor Alan Swann in 1993’s My Favorite Year, and in 2005 for his role as King Arthur in the wildly popular musical Monty Python's Spamalot, written by Eric Idle and based on the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Idle and Curry had a running joke about the roles Hollywood offered British actors, telling The View in 1997, “We shake hands and say, ‘Butlers and villains.’ The fact is, though, the bad guys are always much better written than the good guys, and they're kind of irresistible to play.”

Curry was also a very successful voice actor, playing iconic children’s characters like Captain Hook in 1990’s Peter Pan and the Pirates (for which he won a Daytime Emmy) and Nigel Thornberry on Nickelodeon’s The Wild Thornberrys. In 2006, he was nominated for a Grammy for the audiobook version of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, alongside Meryl Streep, Jim Carrey, and Jude Law.

In 2016, he returned to Rocky Horror, playing the narrator (The Criminologist) for Fox TV’s adaptation of the film with Laverne Cox playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

Last year, at an Academy Museum special screening in celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary, Curry told the audience that having LGBTQ audiences embrace Rocky Horror “means a lot because I think the message of the film—‘don’t dream it, be it’—is very important.” He added, “One of the things that the movie does, I think, is give anyone permission to behave as badly as they really want, in whatever way and with whom. And I’m proud of that.”

Curry himself never publicly defined his sexuality and remained very private about his personal and romantic life. He never married and had no children. Last year, Curry reflected on playing the overtly sexually androgynous character who came to define his career, telling The Guardian, “I did think it was risky, and indeed it was. But I like risky. I would choose risky over anything. That’s the best way to be.”