Tim Curry cause of death has not been stated in the obituary, which says the actor and singer died aged 80. The notice places his death alongside the roles that made him a major figure in stage and screen work, especially Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show.
The Rocky Horror Show
1973 was the year The Rocky Horror Show opened at the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, with Curry in Dr Frank-N-Furter. The production moved along the King’s Road, then crossed to Broadway in 1975, and the screen version followed that same year as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Curry reprising the role.
“just a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” was the line tied to the part that fixed him in popular memory. Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick appeared in the film as the young couple who seek shelter in Dr Frank-N-Furter’s castle after their car breaks down, while Curry became a big star on both sides of the Atlantic in film and on stage.
1968 to 2007
1968 brought Curry’s first professional engagement, in Hair at the Shaftesbury theatre, after he had taken a degree in English and drama at Birmingham University. He first met Richard O’Brien in Hair, then went on to David Mercer’s After Haggerty with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in 1969 and played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park in 1972.
1982 saw him in a rocked-up version of The Pirates of Penzance at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. In 1987, he played Bill Snibson in Stephen Fry’s version of Me and My Girl on a US national tour, and from 2005 to 2007 he played King Arthur in Monty Python’s Spamalot on Broadway and in London.
2012 and after
2012 brought the severe stroke that left Curry a wheelchair-user for the rest of his life. That detail sits uneasily beside the obituary’s more celebratory account of his career, because it shows how abruptly a performer who kept working across decades was forced into a permanent change in mobility.
For readers drawn in by the headline phrase Tim Curry cause of death, the obituary does not give a cause. It does give the end point: Curry died aged 80, and the career it sketches runs from Hair to The Rocky Horror Show and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with no further public account here of what caused his death.
