As a Storyteller, Tim Curry Had the Gift
New York Times · LC · trust 34/100
He was a blast to watch, whether playing a mad scientist in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a butler in “Clue” or a singing King Arthur in “Spamalot.”
Listen · 5:23 min Share full article 0 “I was gorgeous, I think, in a certain kind of courage,” Tim Curry said of what it took to portray the “sweet transvestite” Frank-N-Furter in the “Rocky Horror” productions. Credit... The Walt Disney Company By Laura Collins-Hughes
In September, we met for lunch in Hollywood to talk about his memoir, “Vagabond,” which came out that fall. And then, in November, we spoke again just after the playwright Tom Stoppard had died. They went way back, on the stage and screen, and it seemed obvious that Curry would have an insightful remembrance . (This turned out to be true: “It’s so extraordinary that English was his second language,” he said of Stoppard. “Because nobody advanced it more or cherished it more.”)
Over the phone, Curry observed that Stoppard as a playwright had remained a kind of journalist, which he once had been. “That’s interesting,” I said, meaning it, and Curry’s response took me by surprise — dry and slightly defiant, but with an eggshell crack of vulnerability to it.
“I hope so,” he said, “because I don’t want to be the idiot child in whatever it is you’re writing about him.”
No danger of that — or as I told him by way of reassurance, “Have you met you?” Curry, who died on Tuesday at the age of 80, was ferociously smart. Along with being extraordinarily funny, it’s part of what made him such a superlative storyteller — an ability he kept after the stroke in 2012 that paralyzed his left side, slowed the cadence of his speech and largely ended his acting career.
His memoir is proof that those chops endured. That was in evidence during our lunch, too, when he slipped smoothly into his grandmother’s Scottish accent as he told an anecdote about her, or mimicked me after something I said inadvertently made him laugh.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Read the original at New York Times →
Open in TruthVane →