Remembering Tim Curry: 9 surprising facts about the beloved actor

Britt Hayes, Rachel LaBonteWed, August 26, 2026 at 7:59 PM UTC

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Tim Curry on Jan. 23, 1974Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty I

Tim Curry, the beloved English actor best known for his roles in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Clue, died on Aug. 26, 2026, at age 80.

Curry began his career in the original 1968 London production of the acclaimed musical Hair, and made his big-screen debut in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 musical that became an enduring cult classic thanks in part to packed midnight screenings around the world.

With his distinctive voice and expressive face, Curry had a gift for playing both comedic and villainous roles, leaving behind a legacy that includes numerous iconic performances: the devilish Darkness in Legend (1985), Wadsworth the butler in Clue (1985), the terrifying Pennywise the clown in the 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It, and the antagonistic hotel concierge in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), to name a few.

Though he was a prolific presence in pop culture for several decades, there are still plenty of things even longtime fans might not know about him. Below, Entertainment Weekly takes a look at some of lesser-known facts about the late, great Tim Curry.

01 of 09

Tim Curry originated his iconic Rocky Horror role onstage

Tim Curry as Frank-N-Further in ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’Credit: Movie Poster Image Art/Getty

Before The Rocky Horror Picture Show, there was The Rocky Horror Show. Richard O’Brien’s stage musical debuted in London in 1973, with Tim Curry originating the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the glamorous, hypersexual mad scientist who welcomes newly engaged couple Brad and Janet into his castle.

In 1974, Curry crossed the pond to reprise the role for the show’s U.S. debut at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theatre. He’s kind of an extremist, Frank” Curry said of his role in an interview with the Los Angeles Timesfrom that year. “His life is devoted to… extremity.”

“He says he’s a transvestite transexual, whatever that means. I don’t play him as a transexual,” Curry explained. “But he’s a fairly complex guy. He just takes anything he can get. He’s not fussy, really. Though I think he’s something of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”

02 of 09

Princess Diana was an early fan

Richard O’Brien, Tim Curry, and Patricia Quinn in ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’Credit: Movie Poster Image Art/Getty

As many tributes can attest, Curry amassed a number of famous admirers over the years. Perhaps the most notable — and surprising — was Princess Diana herself.

Curry revealed in a 2005 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air that he met Prince Charles and Princess Diana when they attended a performance of the National Theatre’s Love for Love in Vienna. As he put it, Diana “actually requested to meet me because she was such a Rocky Horror fan.” (He also elaborated on their meeting in his 2025 memoir, Vagabond.)

Upon greeting Curry at the end of the receiving line, Diana brought up The Rocky Horror Show, and Curry admitted that he didn’t think she had seen it. She informed him that she had, and, according to Curry, added that “it quite completed my education.”

“She was a very funny girl, and a very beautiful one and ... a very wicked smile came with that sentence,” Curry recalled. “She was great fun.”

03 of 09

Curry had a little-known music career

Tim Curry at the 59th Annual Tony Awards on June 5, 2005, in New York CityCredit: Peter Kramer/Getty

In addition to being a beloved star of stage and screen, Curry was also a musician. He can be heard on recordings from various musicals he appeared in, including Rocky Horror, as well as on the soundtrack to Annie. He also released three solo studio albums during his recording career.

The first, Read My Lips, arrived in 1978. It was followed a year later by Fearless, which featured his only song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, “I Do The Rock.” His third album, Simplicity, debuted in 1981. In 2010, the archival album …From the Vaults was released, featuring recordings from a previously unreleased album Curry had made in 1976.

Reflecting on his music career in his memoir, Curry recalled how the producers he’d worked with “found it difficult to establish a style or pick a genre for me.” He added, “I take the responsibility for that: I didn’t make it easy.”

“In the beginning, I was laser-focused on the music,” he wrote. “It was thrilling. I wanted to do nothing else for the foreseeable future. Of course, I would have loved to have broken through as a singer. Alas… I did not.”

04 of 09

He was the voice behind some of your childhood favorites

Nigel Thornberry on ‘The Wild Thornberrys’Credit: Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection

Curry’s voice was one of his defining characteristics, leading to a fruitful career as a voice actor. If you grew up in the ‘90s or early 2000s, chances are you heard him more than you realized.

He lent his voice to numerous animated series, including Gargoyles, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Mighty Ducks, and Voltron: The Third Dimension. Most prominently, he voiced eccentric patriarch Nigel Thornberry across Nickelodeon’s Wild Thornberrys franchise, including its two theatrical films.

“I consider it my great privilege to have provided the voice of hundreds of animated characters,” he wrote in his memoir. “It was a challenge I always reveled in doing, and it’s one that I sincerely hope to return to. My voice has always been so central to the development of my characters over the years, but voicework is an entirely unique art form.”

05 of 09

Before Mark Hamill, Curry voiced the Joker

The Joker and Harley Quinn on ‘Batman: The Animated Series’Credit: The WB

Mark Hamill’s voice performance as the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series has become one of the most memorable iterations of the villain, but he wasn’t the first actor cast in the part. That would be Curry, whose brief involvement with the series was rumored for years.

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During a 2017 appearance at Canada’s Fan Expo, Curry confirmed that he had originally been cast as the Joker in the beloved animated series. “I did play Joker for a while,” he said, “but I had bronchitis and they fired me — and hired Mark Hamill. That’s life.”

06 of 09

He was an avid gardener

Tim Curry in West Hollywood on Oct. 13, 2016Credit: Tibrina Hobson/Getty

Curry’s talents extended beyond the entertainment industry, as he was also an accomplished gardener and avid horticulturist. His own Hollywood Hills garden was even featured in the book The New Garden Paradise:Great Private Gardens of the World, and several famous friends and fellow actors benefited from his work.

Colin Farrell told Architectural Digest in 2014 that the reason his garden was “almost magazine worthy” thanks in part to Curry, who had previously lived in Farrell’s house. “Tim Curry is a purveyor of properties: He inhabits a house for two years and does a lot of restructuring work, and my house was one of those,” Farrell explained. “The back garden is really beautiful. He did an amazing job.”

Curry even designed a garden for his friend Freddie Mercury, though the iconic Queen frontman apparently didn’t share his green thumb. As Curry recalled to House & Garden in 1999 (via The Guardian), “Freddie came back from a tour and said, ‘The garden, dear, it’s dead.’ I said ‘What? Did you water it?’ And Freddie said, ‘Water it, dear?’”

07 of 09

Curry’s performance in an obscure video game became an enduring meme

Tim Curry in ‘Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3’Credit: EA Games

A random cutscene from a deeply unserious video game eventually spawned one of the online world’s most enduring memes. In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, released in 2008, Curry plays Soviet Premier Anatoly Cherdenko, who taunts the player during the Allied campaign’s final mission. Explaining that he won’t be captured, he finishes the cutscene by declaring “I’m escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism… SPACE!” — a delivery so indelible that it cemented itself in internet history.

A clip of the scene uploaded to YouTube has since amassed millions of views. In a 2022 oral history of the meme for Vice, the game’s producer, Greg Kasavin, said, “I remember thinking it was a fun, funny moment, though of course I couldn’t have expected it would end up still making the rounds all these years later.”

“It’d be these long takes of them just sitting there reading a teleprompter as lines came up,” reflected Joshua Basche, RA3’s assistant cinematics editor. “It was towards the end of the day, and you could kind of tell Curry was tired, he wanted to get out of there. But then that line comes up. And you saw the smile pop onto his face when he read it through first. The first take was that take.”

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08 of 09

He spent years distancing himself from Rocky Horror

Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick, and Susan Sarandon in ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Despite it being arguably his most iconic role — as well as his film debut — Curry spent a lengthy stretch of his career distancing himself from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In a 1979 interview with JAM Magazine, republished in 2010, Curry was asked whether his music career had been overshadowed by the movie. He denied the premise and bitingly called it “one of the most boring journalistic openings I have ever heard.”

By 1990, Curry expressed little interest in participating in a then-rumored Rocky Horror sequel, telling interviewer Steve Newton that he viewed the original as a “one-shot deal.”

“You know, I did die in the movie,” he said. “I’m sure they could get around that, but no — I mean, I have nightmares about getting into that lot again.”

Curry’s relationship with Rocky Horror appeared to soften later in life, particularly when he returned to the franchise as the narrator in Fox’s TV remake, The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again. In 2016, he told TheWrap that revisiting the material was “fun.”

“I didn’t miss much,” he said. “It was fun though, to do it again.”

By the time the film celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025, Curry was much more open to reflecting on the role that made him a star. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, he fondly recalled Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

“He takes no prisoners — it’s his world and you just happen to live in it,” Curry said. “He doesn’t leave much air in the room. And I enjoyed that because it was so not like me, really.”

In his memoir, Curry wrote that he had come to “despise” the term “cult classic” because of its association with the film. “But its renewal, polarized opinions, and ongoing manifestations have made it deserving of that title,” he conceded.

09 of 09

Curry was fiercely private about his personal life

Tim Curry in Los Angeles on Oct. 15, 2025Credit: Rebecca Sapp/Getty

Curry never married or had children, though little is known about his romantic life, as the actor was famously uninterested in sharing those part of himself with the public — something he addressed in his memoir.

“I guarantee you, if it matters, that I have experienced true love, true heartbreak, and everything in between, including no small amount of wreckage. Which, naturally, helps inform who I am,” Curry wrote in the introduction. “I have loved and been loved and I hope you have, too. But I’m not interested in your romances. And specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are—respectfully—none of your f---ing business.”

He addressed his personal life again in a later chapter, writing, “I don’t admire the part of show business that deems your personal life public property. I mean, it’s all very well when you’re happy, but it can be extremely nasty when you’re not. And I frankly don’t think it’s anybody’s business. I disagree with anybody who believes that you are depriving people from enjoying a production if you don’t bare your soul to the public while you’re taking on a role.”

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