Easy Street: Remembering Tim Curry

If you were a casting director sometime in the past forty years or so and you were looking for someone who could be vaguely disreputable and effortlessly likable with a veneer of dignity and an edge of comical chaos, you would flip your Rolodex again and again to the same name: Tim Curry. With big heavy-lidded eyes, a rubbery face and a bright flash of charming savagery in his smile, Curry attacked movie screens with irresistible force and killer fishnets in his film debut in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and then just never really went away.

Curry, who died August 25 at the age of 80, was a trained and credentialed theater guy who got nominated for Tonys and Oliviers for his work in classics by Dickens, Shakespeare, Brecht, Genet, Tom Stoppard, and Gilbert & Sullivan; he performed in Restoration comedies and Jacobean tragedies, in Hair and Spamalot. But mass American audiences probably mostly knew him as another one of those “Hey-it’s-that-guy” actors. Curry liked to work and he liked to pay bills, so he built up a hefty IMDB page of credits backing the top-liners in mainstream fare like The Hunt for Red October, Scary Movie 2, Congo, and a bunch of mostly forgettable movie adaptations of mostly forgettable TV sitcoms.

But Curry was too keen and talented a performer not to leave a mark whenever a movie gave him half a chance, which is why legions of filmgoers vividly remember him as the seductively predatory, licentiously undead Dr. Frank N. Furter in Rocky Horror. Or as the tightly wound sprinting butler in Clue. Or the flamboyant and flirtatious plunderer Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. Or – my personal favorite – the brazenly untrustworthy song-and-dance conman Rooster in Annie.

When an actor’s able to seize the screen, and launch a scheme, like Tim Curry, it was hard not to feel a little disgruntled when he’d show up in something like Home Alone 2, hitting his marks, being dutifully uptight and getting bamboozled by a ten-year-old. “Pennywise would eat Kevin McCallister for breakfast,” you wanted to shout at the screen. But any Tim Curry was good Tim Curry; you’d rather have him there on the periphery than not around at all.