Tim Curry Earned Everything: The Stage Swallowed Him First

Tim Curry died at 80, and the obituaries are already doing what obituaries always do — reaching for the two or three images that fit on a screen. Frank-N-Furter in fishnets. Pennywise in the drain. Wadsworth with the candlestick. They are not wrong to reach for them. But they are reaching for the costume when the performance is the thing.

Curry entered the professional world through *Hair* on stage, in the 1960s, before anyone knew what to do with someone who could be simultaneously threatening and delightful, who could make an audience deeply uncomfortable and completely unable to look away. That tension — the thing that makes *The Rocky Horror Picture Show* feel dangerous even now, that makes his Wadsworth in *Clue* feel like a man genuinely enjoying the chaos he's conducting — that was never an accident. It was craft, built over decades, starting on stages where you cannot hide and cannot be cut.

What strikes me, watching the tributes scroll past, is how thoroughly Curry defied the usual Hollywood categorisation. He was British, theatrical, trained in a way that American cinema has always slightly distrusted, and he spent most of his career in exactly the roles the industry uses to dispose of people it doesn't quite know how to cast: the villain, the eccentric, the character actor orbiting leads who had straighter teeth and safer energy. He took every single one of those roles and made them the reason you remember the film.

The 2012 stroke slowed him. It didn't end him — he kept working, kept showing up — but it altered the trajectory, and there is something quietly devastating about knowing that a performer of that physical precision lost some of the instrument late. What he'd already given, though, was more than enough for several careers.

Elsewhere this week, the universe of moving images is doing what it does in the late summer quiet: filling the gap. Netflix has confirmed that *The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth*, the Quentin Tarantino follow-up directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, hits IMAX on November 25 — which is either a gift or a threat, depending on your feelings about both men working together again after *Fight Club* and *Seven*. Lee Chang-dong's first film in eight years premieres at Venice and lands on Netflix this autumn, and if *Burning* is any benchmark, clear your evening and cancel whatever comes after.

Tim Curry, though. He earned the front of the line.