Tim Curry Pioneered Fashion With His ‘Rocky Horror’ Performance
New York Times · LC · trust 40/100
His performance as Frank-N-Furter, the cross-dressing mad scientist of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” was ahead of its time.
Listen · 3:58 min Share full article 1 Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” from 1975. Credit... 20th Century Fox, via Alamy By Guy Trebay
So many elements of Curry’s indelible performance as a cross-dressing mad scientist in the musical comedy “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” have been absorbed by the culture that it can be hard to remember how transgressive the character seemed in the mid-1970s.
Back when Sylvester Stallone, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds were the reigning box-office champs, a gender-bending protagonist had the power to shock.
True, popular entertainment had been there before, in the form of now-forgotten Broadway stars like Julian Eltinge, who performed largely in female roles early in the 20th century.
Yet Curry’s character, Frank-N-Furter, who hails from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy Transylvania, was something new, a creature of that liminal zone in which sexuality was slippery, lipstick was hardly a barrier to masculinity and gender refused to stay fixed.
Curry, the British actor who died at 80 on Tuesday, portrayed Frank-N-Furter both onstage and onscreen. Unlike so many actors before him, who played cross-dressing characters mainly for laughs, Curry seemed fully at ease in a corset, fishnet stockings and high heels.
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