He’s Been a Great Lesson to Me: Tim Curry, 1946-2026

In his excellent autobiography, Vagabond, Tim Curry refuses to kiss and tell. His affairs are his business, thank you very much, and they aren’t yours. He does, however, acknowledge a torrid relationship with Miss Piggy, because we all knew about that one anyway. He also expresses annoyance at the idea that Michael Caine treated all the Muppets as humans whereas he’s just a Muppet, because he worked very hard on that movie, the same as all his others. He was an actor, and acting is a craft. But also, in many ways, Tim Curry was just a Muppet.

He did work very hard. IMDb lists 244 credits, plus two upcoming, and that doesn’t include his stage roles. Nor does it specifically include the fact that many of those are TV shows for which he did more than one episode, and not always as voicework, either. Even after his 2012 stroke, he kept working. Oh, not as much. He could no longer walk, and his short-term memory had been affected. But Tim Curry kept working because, as near as I can tell, he didn’t know how to stop. And didn’t want to. He loved what he did.

Like Dolly Parton, Curry was an LGBT+ icon. A little more blatantly. While he wished people would stop telling him in quite such explicit detail how hot they thought he was, he was very proud of having given people the courage to be themselves. If you came out as trans because of Dr. Frank, he was glad to have helped you. If you came out as gay or bi or pan or whatever because of Dr. Frank, he was glad to have helped you. Like Dolly Parton, he loved you and your courage, and he wanted you to live your best life, no matter who you love or how you present.

It’s also clear that he’s an example of how much you can do with the right attitude. Curry wasn’t unattractive, but he wasn’t as astonishingly attractive as David Bowie. But he projected just as much raw sexuality in Rocky Horror as Bowie did in Labyrinth, and he did it with a swagger and a strut, and, okay, that magnificent voice. But I find it impossible to evaluate his physical appearance because it almost didn’t matter. It’s all about that attitude. He was attractive because he made you think he was attractive, and he looked as though he was seeing you as attractive, too, no matter what you look like.

There was, obviously, more to him than Dr. Frank. I have a special love of him as Dr. Poole in Oscar, a little-known farce that still makes me laugh myself sick. I would kill for a good release of him as Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men in a Boat. I’m one of those weirdos who likes The Shadow, and of course as a woman of my generation I think of him when I think of Pennywise. He was Long John Silver, obviously, and one of the about eighty thousand celebrities each to have done Captain Planet and Gargoyles. He voiced God, Judas, and the Serpent in assorted Bible cartoons. And, of course, he was escaping to the one place that hadn’t been corrupted by capitalism—space!