‘It’s difficult not to see it as a kind of finale,” says Tim Curry of his memoir, Vagabond. That he’s written it at all is a surprise. Curry has always liked the comfort of privacy – my efforts to persuade him to do an interview with the Guardian began more than five years ago. At 79, he still prefers looking forward, too, which is how he has covered so much ground in his career.
Boundless energy has been the actor’s hallmark. He once exerted so much while filming the murder mystery comedy Clue – in which he plays the frantic, sharp-tongued butler Wadsworth – that a nurse who took his blood pressure on set told him he was at risk of having a heart attack.
His most famous screen role remains his 1975 breakthrough, as The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s perplexing sex symbol, Dr Frank-N-Furter. But he has played many irresistible villains; for me, he will always be Pennywise the clown from the terrifying 1990 miniseries of Stephen King’s It. His stage performances in The Pirates of Penzance in 1982 and Spamalot in 2007 were both nominated for Olivier awards. And he has voiced dozens of characters, endearing himself to a generation of millennials as explorer Nigel Thornberry in the cartoon classic The Wild Thornberrys.
Whatever the role, Curry oozes heart and joie de vivre, his grin dancing between menace and joy. Has any actor ever had more fun than he did as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island?
“I’m very aware that I’m lucky,” he says. “I’m astonished actually at how ambitious I’ve been. I didn’t think of myself as ambitious at all.”
Comedy has been important for him as a performer. But more recently it’s become a “coping mechanism”, too. In 2012, at 67, he had a severe stroke, leaving his left side paralysed. He is grateful that he didn’t lose his speech. Making other people laugh is clearly a thrill for him – his conversation is full of cutting remarks, punchlines and exemplary voice work. How did his stroke change his outlook on life? “The day before I had the stroke, I smoked three packs of Marlboro Reds,” he says. “I won’t be doing that again!”
Between the stroke and the pandemic, Curry had what he describes as “an appalling amount of time to reflect”. Vagabond is the result, a witty page-turner, full of life. Come for the career, stay for the celebrity encounters: impromptu dinners with David Bowie after stage performances of The Rocky Horror Show; working through bowls of cocaine at Studio 54 with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol (Carly Simon, also present, did not partake); and a hilariously catty encounter with Donald Trump on the set of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (we’ll get to that, don’t worry).
There are omissions. Affairs of the heart or bedroom, he writes, “are – respectfully – none of your fucking business”.
“I tried to be as absolutely truthful as possible,” he says. “I couldn’t see the point of doing it otherwise, really. It gave me energy, I must say. That was great. It was partly, I think, the energy of a new playground.”
I’ve always tried to make my villains amusing. It gives them a bit more edge
Ivana Trump knocked on my door and said, ‘Are you happy in your room?’ I loathed it.
Curry is a self-confessed showoff. When he was a child, he says, his chuckle revving up, “it sounds awful, but I thought I kind of had it, and I was just waiting to be discovered”. His father was a chaplain in the Royal Navy, and his earliest memories are of singing in the choir at church services. The music was good – “the Methodist hymn book has got some cracking tunes” – but the admiration his performances inspired was just as appealing.
He was a precocious voice artist. His mother had spent time living in the US and would delight Curry by launching into a thick New York accent. It didn’t take him long to nail it himself and to develop his own repertoire of accents, which he’d deploy to try to make her laugh. After mastering the voice of a local grocer, he would sneak out and knock on the front door, announcing himself from behind it with some great flattery for her, much to her fury when she realised she’d been fooled.
Curry was born in 1946, in Cheshire, and lived the nomadic life of a military brat. Every 18 months or so, the Curry family (his mother, father and beloved older sister, Judy) would move to a different British seaside town, before settling in Plymouth when Curry was 11. This peripatetic lifestyle made it difficult for him to foster friendships, but he remembers it fondly. It gave him a lasting adoration of the coast (“the sea is terribly important to me. The British sea anyway. The colder the better”) and set him up for a life of moving from place to place, never getting too attached (hence, his book’s title, Vagabond). He never felt lonely, especially at home. “There was no lack of personality in the house. So you had to fight for air, you know?”
Curry adored his father, who he describes as a good Christian man – empathetic, selfless – who wanted to do good and who never imposed his faith on his children.
Was he ever tempted to follow his father into the ministry? “No, not at all.” Did any of the principles seep in? “I’m not particularly God-fearing, but I respect it very much. I think the values did, because Methodists are encouraged to live life simply and see it simply. And I think I’ve pretty much kept to that.”
When Curry was 11, his father had a stroke. Weeks later, while being treated in hospital, he contracted pneumonia and died. “It was kind of oddly way too dramatic,” says Curry. “I didn’t know how to behave really, because I knew it was going to be incredibly formative.”
Curry’s father was 49. “A baby,” he says. “I couldn’t reconcile it as being the truth.” He tried to support his mother and be the man of the house, “but it wasn’t a very convincing portrayal, I believe. Nobody was buying it.”
After his father died, his mother became irritable – volatile, even. She could be cruel (she found the idea of her daughter dating hilarious, Curry writes, as she didn’t think his sister Judy was pretty) and frightening. “I’m being a bit cautious about this, because I did in the first draft include a very brief passage where she came at me with a knife in the kitchen,” he says. “I think she was actually bipolar because she could just explode.” Curry processed his fear of his mother through his work: her expressions of rage manifested in Pennywise and Cardinal Richelieu in the Three Musketeers; as Dr Frank-N-Furter, he thought of her as he emerged from a refrigerator wielding the axe with which he’d just murdered Meat Loaf.
Curry went away to boarding school on a scholarship, when he was 10 – “brutally early”, he writes – where he was targeted by bullies due to his boisterous demeanour, disregard for authority and eccentric interests (he collected butterflies). Not to mention what he describes as his best weapon: the English language. “I had a smart mouth, you know, and I used to have to pay for it quite often.” But he found allies in some teachers and choirmasters, who fostered his love of music and theatre.
After school, Curry took a gap year with his good school friend Richard Cork, who went on to become an art critic. During their travels across Europe in a van, they spotted Picasso eating lunch at a cafe in Cannes. Cork grabbed his sketchbook and drew the artist. Picasso noticed, grabbed the sketchbook himself, and did his own drawing on the other side, telling them, as he handed it back: “Just in case you want to stay a bit longer in Cannes”. (Cork still has the drawing today.)
After the gap year, Curry studied English and drama at the University of Birmingham, then graduated and moved to London to pursue acting.
His first role, at 23, was as a hippy in the original 1968 London production of Hair. He had the lifestyle nailed down. He began smoking a lot of mediocre hash, incorporating the latter into his roast chicken dish. When dinner guests arrived at his house, he would ask: “Will you have a glass of wine or will you wait for the stuffing?” he says. “By the end of the evening, the guests were talking in an unknown language and understanding each other, which was a little frightening. I just remember laughing so much that I had to hang out of the window to get enough air to breathe.”
It was another chance encounter, this time with Richard O’Brien, that led him to audition for The Rocky Horror Show, an experimental sci-fi musical and his first play. O’Brien needed a muscle man who could sing. Curry auditioned in boots he’d spray painted silver, performing a raucous rendition of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, throwing himself around and behaving quite badly. Shortly afterwards, he was cast as the cross-dressing scientist, Dr Frank-N-Furter. No one, he was told later, had approached the audition quite as he had.
Given the overtly sexual and androgynous nature of the role, it must have felt like a risk. “I did think it was risky and indeed it was. But I like risky. I would choose risky over anything. That’s the best way to be.”
Curry picked out Frank’s shoes himself from a women’s shop – the most comfortable black heels he could find in his size (they are one of the only bits of memorabilia he’s held on to). He had previously played Solange in Genet’s The Maids at the Glasgow Citizens theatre, where costume designer Sue Blane dressed him in a Victorian corset, worn backwards: “It was the only way it looked good.” For Frank, she pulled the same trick, ditching the lab coat and putting him in a corset. As for the voice, after some experimentation (obnoxious German, middle-European), Curry pinched the accent of a posh woman he overheard on a bus, who was trying to sound like the queen.
The opening night was, writes Curry, one of his most magical experiences. An immediate hit, the audiences at the Royal Court theatre included everyone from Princess Margaret to Bowie (who made a show of applauding with his hands over his head whenever Curry appeared). “It was an extraordinary thing really, because I really liked that it was almost underground,” he says. “It was pretty alternative. And I got to work with some very clever people.” He didn’t have much of a fan in his mother, though, who was largely, he writes, “unimpressed (at best) and even embarrassed” by his career successes. “Well, Frank-N-Furter was kind of out there and I think she was nervous about how it would be received by her fellow churchgoers,” he says. “I would have preferred pride and encouragement.” She did later enjoy it when his career led to her meeting royalty. When he played The Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, the queen mother decided to attend on her 80th birthday. His mother came too – a rare occurrence – muscling her way backstage for the moment the queen mother was presented with a cake.
Playing Frank was liberating, he says. “Enormously, because basically he can fuck anybody. That’s quite a charge. It’s important to make that believable.” Did he tap into that energy outside work? “Well, I wasn’t lonely! It wasn’t too difficult to get laid. But it was the 70s, which is crucial to what it is, I think.”
Curiously, Curry says he didn’t experience much, if any, backlash to playing Frank, which probably wouldn’t be the case today. And the show taught him a lesson about himself. “I wasn’t sure that I had the courage to do it, and I did and that was good. I resolved to apply it to my life.”
I did cocaine most evenings, but I wasn’t Mr Snorterama. I had stuff to get done!
I’m astonished at how ambitious I’ve been. I didn’t think of myself as ambitious at all
After a very slow start, the show became a phenomenal success, in the UK and the US, and was soon turned into a film. It grew a cult status, in part due to the raucous participation from theatregoers (fancy dress, singing along to the songs and shouting dialogue at the screen). A curious Curry once visited a New York cinema to see the festivities for himself. His presence caused such a commotion, the woman at the cinema ticket booth, believing that he was an impostor, tried to throw him out, ignoring his insistence that he was the real Tim Curry. She only believed him once he showed her his passport. The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains the longest-running theatrical release in film history, shown in cinemas continually since its 1975 premiere.
When the film took off, he started being recognised in the street. Was it hard to stay grounded? “I think it’s difficult for everybody – depending on how intense the approval is.” Curry has always preferred to love his audience from a distance. He is quieter and more reserved than Frank, and found being a sex symbol uncomfortable, worrying that it would be professionally limiting. “It turned out really not to be. I just barrelled on. I used to say to my agents, ‘Just get me in the room and I’ll take care of it.’ Because if I really wanted something, I tried very hard to get it.”
Curry sees the pursuit of fame as essentially worthless. “I certainly don’t enjoy it, but I get it,” he says. “And I play the game. Because, certainly, any kind of moving picture endeavour is so expensive now that you’d better come up with the goods and promote the shit out of it.”
He realised the extent his life had changed after buying his first home in Los Angeles. “The first time I actually drove home, there were two people going through my garbage can, and that’s when I knew it was out of control.” He also had to contact the police about a stalker, a man “on parole from serving a sentence in Folsom, for the manslaughter of his boyfriend”, about 30 years before. “It was weird. Along the side of the sidewalk, going up to this big poncey gate to the Spanish house that I was in, there was a little bit of a garden in the front and I’d find beer bottles there. He would spend the night there sometimes. It was horrible. I had nightmares about it. They arrested him and sent him back to jail.”
Shortly after Rocky Horror, Curry moved to New York where he embarked on a short-lived stint as a rock star. Around the same time, he started using cocaine. Is it fair to say he was a hedonist? “Back in the day, yes,” he says. “I’m not very larky now!” When his usage was at its peak he was taking coke, “most evenings, I would say, because I wasn’t Mr Snorterama in the day. Because, you know, I had stuff to get done. It was part of living in New York in the 80s.” Does he miss those days? “I don’t, because Manhattan is a grim little island. Way too much energy. And you have to participate.”
After releasing three albums in quick succession (his second, Fearless, reached number 53 on the charts; his single I Do the Rock made it on to the Billboard 100), Curry’s record contract came to an end and wasn’t renewed. His cocaine use slowed down, too. He writes that he had no trouble quitting cocaine, though he’d still have the odd bump here and there (which he’d immediately regret). “I think there was some kind of minor epiphany, but I don’t remember what it was. But it obviously couldn’t go on,” he writes in Vagabond. Later, alcohol became a crutch, and, though he spent time in rehab to get it under control, he says he never felt like an alcoholic. “I don’t think I ever quite qualified, really.”
In the 80s, Curry began his run of iconic villains, first as The Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott’s Legend. There are two reasons he thinks he makes a good villain. The first is that he inherited his father’s empathy, and found himself able to identify with even the most despicable characters. Second: “I’ve always tried to make them amusing, which gives them a bit more edge,” he says. “It’s like people being drawn to the scene of a car crash. They’re drawn to extreme behaviour … I think people secretly long to be a bit more explosive or act out much more.”
Curry had to learn to shake off these villains during a shoot. “Eventually I got better and better at it, because I had to have a life. You’ve got to dump it somewhere. When you’ve been acting as a character for a whole day, it’s quite difficult to shake them off. Particularly if you throw yourself completely into it, which I tried to do.”
The 90s proved fruitful. It was while playing one memorable role in that period, as the concierge of the Plaza hotel in Home Alone 2, that he encountered Trump, who owned the hotel. At the time, says Curry, Trump and his girlfriend Marla Maples were all over the front pages. “He was very anxious to find Chris Columbus, the director … He said: ‘I’ve got to get Marla to meet Chris Columbus because she’s a brilliant actress.’ And I thought: ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’” He also found himself having to lie to Ivana Trump about her taste in interiors, after moving into the hotel while making the movie. “She knocked on my door and said, ‘Are you happy in your room? Do you like the way it looks?’ And I loathed it actually.”
There is no contest as to the film Curry remembers most fondly. “I would love to work with the Muppets again,” he says. “The great thing is that the Muppeteers themselves, if they have their puppet on their hand, they only talk to you as the character. I love that.” Curry is aware of the popular trivia nugget about the film – that the reason he was so good in it was because he considered himself a fellow muppet – but that is categorically not how he sees it.
His favourite Muppet is Miss Piggy. “I ad-libbed a line, because me and Piggy were supposed to have had some kind of affair long ago, and I said: [he slips into his Devonshire pirate accent] ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Jim, once you’ve had pork, you never go back!’” It didn’t make the cut.
In 1999, Curry’s mother died at the age of 80. Although they’d had a turbulent relationship when he was growing up, Curry had learned to empathise with her (she’d been ignored and unloved by her own parents) and, ultimately, they were able to reconcile. After he moved to the US, whenever he came back to the UK to visit his sister he’d always check in on his mother, too. When she was in her 60s, they started a tradition of staying at a fancy hotel on Plymouth Hoe, with Curry inviting her friends to join. “I think we kind of owned up to the way it was,” he says. Two years later, Curry experienced what he describes as the greatest tragedy of his life, when his sister, who he adored, died from a brain tumour at the age of 60 (he is still close to his two nieces and nephew). He tries not to dwell on all this loss. “I don’t try to organise it very much, my life,” he says. “One step at a time, really.”
Curry’s stroke happened while he was having a massage. The masseur noticed something wasn’t quite right, ignored Curry’s insistence that he was fine, and called an ambulance – a life-saving decision. At hospital, he was rushed into brain surgery. “It was an odd thing, because my father had a stroke and died very soon afterwards. I knew I had to force myself to relax and just take the opportunity to float a little.” Did he think about his father a lot during his convalescence? “I did think about how he coped. He was very determined to not be a changed man for us, you know.”
Afterwards, Curry was unable to speak for several weeks. But over the course of many months and rehabilitation centres, he learned to adapt. Since the stroke, it was also discovered that he has an aneurysm in his abdomen. Today, he uses a wheelchair, still flashes his unmistakable grin, and speaks clearly (though he may take a moment to gather his thoughts). He has a team of three carers. “They really take incredibly good care of me and make me laugh.” He still can’t use his left arm (which he has nicknamed Teddy) and has a shorter temper. The hardest thing for him to accept about his condition has been the loss of short-term memory. “I can’t remember a fucking thing. I’m not sure that I could do theatre again.”
Curry has never feared death. He writes that he doesn’t believe in heaven or hell, but would be curious to visit either. Does he worry about having another stroke? “I probably should. It could happen any time. I wouldn’t want to go through it again. Because it just makes you so fucking vulnerable.”
Curry plans to continue acting when he can; in 2016 he appeared as a criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show remake. He’s started attending fan conventions, too, where he looks out and sees his life’s work reflected back to him in the audiences’ costumes. This is humbling and overwhelming, he says.
Has he had the career he wanted? “I’ve had the opportunities,” he says, “and I’m still showing up. You know? I think that’s what you have to do. You have to keep showing up.”
Did he put his career before everything else? “No. No. Life first. Really. But I’ll sure as hell make sure I get it together to do a part well. I actually work very hard. I have to. Some people can just sail in and deliver.”
What message would he want people to take from his life story?
A big pause. “He took it on the chin,” he says, finally. And that famous grin spreads across his face.
Vagabond is out now, published by Century books £25. To support the Guardian, order a copy from guardianbookshop. Delivery charges may apply
Photography
Main imagery: Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975 (CinetextBildarchiv/20th Century Fox/Allstar); Curry in 1974 (Evening Standard/Getty Images)
