Tim Curry — the actor who frightened a generation as the child-devouring clown Pennywise and turned himself into a cult legend as Dr. Frank-N-Furter — has died at 80 at his Los Angeles home. He had been recovering from a serious stroke since 2012.
Curry’s death on Tuesday at his Los Angeles home was confirmed by Marcia Hurwitz, his longtime agent and manager. He was 80.
No role marked him more than Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the self-styled “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Curry first played the character on the London stage in 1973, led the show’s American premiere in Los Angeles in 1974, and carried it into the 1975 movie that grew into a midnight-screening tradition, complete with costumed fans singing along. The film reached its 50th anniversary in 2025.
To many, though, he’ll always be Pennywise, the murderous demon disguised as a clown in the 1990 mini-series of Stephen King’s “It.” He lent that signature menace to plenty of other roles, too: Rooster Hannigan in “Annie” (1982), the quick-tongued butler Wadsworth in “Clue” (1985), Darkness in Ridley Scott‘s “Legend,” and Cardinal Richelieu in “The Three Musketeers” (1993). His voice pulled its own weight, breathing life into animated figures from a hook-billed hawk general to a cat with a French accent.
Broadway rewarded him with Tony nominations for “Amadeus,” “My Favorite Year,” and “Spamalot,” in which he took on King Arthur. Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised him as “the best of the cast at translating classic Python style into a musical-comedy idiom.”
The 2012 stroke was a serious one. “I’ve been recovering for quite a long time,” he said last year. Curry never married and declined to talk about his private life, putting it this way in his 2025 memoir “Vagabond”: “I have loved and been loved and I hope you have, too. But I’m not interested in your romances.”
He held the role that made him famous loosely. Asked years later how he regarded Frank-N-Furter in retrospect, he replied, “With a sort of bemused tolerance. It’s neither a blessing nor a curse. I was lucky to get it.”
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