Tim Curry Reflects on 50 Years of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: “Gives Anyone Permission to Behave Badly”
September 26 saw the 50th anniversary of perhaps the most famous and continuously successful cult classic of all time: The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The most recent cinema event featuring this legendary sci-fi musical took place on this very day at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
Here, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was screened in its newly-remastered 4K version before legions of dedicated fans who couldn’t wait to partake in the myriad rituals of the Rocky Horror cult. Also in attendance were several of the film’s original cast members; among them was Tim Curry, who had the opportunity both to enjoy a thunderous standing ovation and to reflect at length on his indelible role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
Tim Curry in 1975: Immortalized as a Mad Alien Scientist
The Rocky Horror Picture Show takes place primarily in a remote mansion populated by a veritable gallery of unforgettable, mostly extraterrestrial characters. There’s hardly a single actor in this movie whose character’s face alone isn’t instantly recognizable on any poster.
Perhaps the epitome of this one-of-a-kind cast is Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter: a self-proclaimed “Sweet Transvestite” who hails from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania. (No good sci-fi tale is complete without in-depth world-building). It’s a real testament to Curry’s performance that Frank-N-Furter, a diabolical scientist who commits plenty of not-so-sweet deeds (i.e. creating an Adonis as a living sex toy, making use of a machine that turns people into stone sculptures, preparing a meal of human remains) over the course of the film, nonetheless glues your eyes to the screen from his first appearance all the way to his dramatic demise.
Tim Curry Today: Full of Behind-the-Scenes Tidbits
At Friday’s screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry regaled the packed theater with anecdotes from his experience of making the movie, which began life as a stage production simply named The Rocky Horror Show, with the same director, Jim Sharman. Curry recounted that Sharman seemed to grade his actors’ choices in two categories: the boring choices, which weren’t tolerated, and those that didn’t bore him and were thus allowed.
The name “Frank-N-Furter” initially inspired Curry to play the character with a German accent. The German mad scientist is a pretty common trope, whether we’re talking about Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove, and perhaps for that reason, this decision fell into Sharman’s boring category. Curry hit on an alternative accent while listening to a conversation between two rather snobbish-sounding women during a London bus ride. “They wanted to sound like the queen,” he recalled, per The Hollywood Reporter, “and that seemed appropriate for Frank, really, who clearly thought he was the queen.”
Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s visage is instantly recognizable for its striking makeup, with his purple-black lipstick and similarly dark eyeshadow contrasting starkly with the vampiric paleness of the rest of his visage. Curry explained that he did his own makeup for The Rocky Horror Show, but when it came to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he had a professional makeup artist named Pierre La Roche. La Roche’s work actually left Curry “horrified,” because he thought that it looked “too polished for me. I wanted to just kind of smudge it all, but I didn’t dare, because he was a very formidable character.”
Tim Curry on Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s Legacy
It would be difficult to name another famous character in any movie who even remotely resembles Tim Curry’s iconic role, and it was hard for him to predict whether his fame as a crazed transvestite scientist from another galaxy would benefit or harm his future career. “I was really quite worried that it was going to be difficult, but it wasn’t,” he explained. The same year as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he was cast in a comedy TV movie called Three Men in a Boat; he recalled that upon asking director Stephen Frears, “What makes you think that I can play a Victorian bank clerk?” Frears answered, “If you can play Frank-N-Furter, you can play anything.”
The Rocky Horror Picture Show has earned a devoted queer fanbase over the decades; even in the context of a certifiably off-the-wall comedy, its themes of sexual liberation in general and the gender fluidity of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in particular have resonated with many queer viewers and constituted an early showcasing of queer themes onscreen. Curry professed that this resonance “means a lot” to him: “I think the message of the film – don’t dream it, be it – is very important.”
At the same time, the character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter can scarcely be described as a positive role model (the scene that exemplifies his gender fluidity is probably the one in which he separately seduces both members of a straight couple by posing as one or the other), and Curry’s summarization of The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s celebrated thematic influence is rather oddly worded: “One of the things that the movie does, I think, is give anyone permission to behave as badly as they really want, in whatever way and with whom. And I’m proud of that.”
A Very Appreciative Star
It’s clear that Curry is as gracious as he is proud. Surrounded by adoring, well-costumed fans who were ready for their umpteenth screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he remarked: “I’m so excited by this and very honored by the Academy to do this presentation of our movie, which has dragged on for 50 years.”
Curry has been in a wheelchair since suffering a stroke in 2012. “So I won’t be singing and I won’t be dancing very soon,” he admitted. But even if he has no further future in musicals, Tim Curry has already achieved a distinction more iconic and bizarre than very many actors in that genre can claim. “It’s awfully late, isn’t it?” he concluded with a yawn. “Why don’t we show the pic?”
