Tim Curry: 1946 to (2026), the Man in the Fishnets

The most transgressive character in mainstream cinema was played by a Methodist minister’s son from Cheshire.

Tim Curry was born on 19 April 1946. His father was a naval chaplain who died when Curry was twelve. He died himself at his home in Los Angeles at 80, with Wikipedia recording the date as 25 August 2026 and the news breaking the following day.

Frank-N-Furter

He originated the role on stage in London in 1973, before the film existed, and carried it into the 1975 picture.

What he did with it is difficult to overstate now that the shock has worn off. The Rocky Horror Show arrived at a moment when nothing like Frank-N-Furter existed in popular culture, and Curry played him without a trace of apology or wink. The performance is camp and genuinely menacing at the same time, which is a much harder register than it looks.

The film flopped. Then it found midnight audiences, and it has run continuously in cinemas ever since, which no other film has managed. Fifty years later there are still people in fishnets throwing rice at screens because of what he did in 1973.

The Problem of Being Unrecognisable

He spent the rest of his career escaping it, mostly by disappearing into parts.

Clue in 1985 gave him Wadsworth the butler and one of the great sustained comic performances in American film, in a picture that failed on release and became a permanent television fixture afterwards. It in 1990 gave him Pennywise, and a substantial share of a generation’s fear of clowns.

Then there was the voice work, which became the largest part of the output. Animated films, television, video games, decades of it. Enormous numbers of people who could not identify his face knew that voice immediately, which is the character actor’s particular kind of fame: total ubiquity, minimal recognition.

After the Stroke

In 2012 he had a stroke that left him using a wheelchair.

He did not withdraw. He spoke about it plainly, kept recording voice work, and appeared at conventions where the Rocky Horror crowd had been waiting for decades and had no interest whatsoever in whether he could walk.

There is a version of this story that treats the stroke as the end of the career. It was not. It was the point at which a working actor changed which part of the job he did.

Vagabond

In October 2025, aged 79, he published his only memoir through Grand Central.

The New York Times reviewed it and observed how little wickedness was actually in it, which is a fair joke about a man who spent fifty years being introduced as the most decadent figure in popular cinema and was, by all accounts, an exceptionally courteous Englishman who liked gardening.

He gave interviews around the release. Ten months later he was dead.

The timing looks less like coincidence than like someone who knew roughly where he was and wanted the record in his own words first.