British actor Tim Curry, whose corseted, fishnet-clad Dr. Frank-N-Furter in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” became a permanent fixture of film history, died peacefully at his home in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles on August 25, 2026. He was 80. Publicist Sean Katz confirmed the death to USA TODAY.
Katz issued the announcement for Marcia Hurwitz, Curry’s longtime manager and friend. “Though widely known for his inimitable, flamboyant characters and colorful stage performances, his greatest legacies to those who knew him were his curious, expansive mind and generous, gentle heart, both of which remained open and filled with anticipation until his final breath,” the statement read. Coronary artery disease was given as his official cause of death.
The Los Angeles Police Department said officers were summoned at 11:20 p.m. on August 25 to a death investigation involving a man in his 80s at a Los Angeles address. Crews from the Los Angeles Fire Department had reached the same address at 10:42 p.m. for a medical emergency, the department said, and an adult man was pronounced dead there.
A major stroke in 2012 left Curry partially paralyzed, and his health had been poor ever since. He addressed it directly at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on September 26, 2025, during a 50th-anniversary screening of “Rocky Horror,” telling the audience: “I still can’t walk, which is why I’m in this silly chair, and that’s very limiting. So I won’t be singing and I won’t be dancing very soon. I still have real problems with my left leg.”
From “Hair” to Frank-N-Furter
Timothy James Curry was born on April 19, 1946, in Cheshire, England. His mother worked as a school secretary; his father was a Methodist chaplain serving in the Royal Navy, and a stroke struck him when Curry was 11, with pneumonia claiming him later. Curry studied drama at the University of Birmingham and walked straight out of school into his first professional job — the original 1968 West End staging of the rock musical “Hair.”
Richard O’Brien, a castmate on that run, was writing a musical of his own, and in 1973 he offered Curry the role of Frank-N-Furter. Curry first played the character that year in the tiny upstairs space at London’s Royal Court Theatre, and he helped remake a figure originally conceived as a German scientist in a lab coat into a creation in corset and fishnet stockings who spoke like the queen.
The film version Fox released in 1975, with a young Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, flopped out of the gate. What followed was a midnight-screening tradition of costumes, props and shouted callbacks stretching more than five decades — no other movie has ever had a longer continuous theatrical run. The score included “The Time Warp,” “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” “Touch-a-Touch-a-Touch-a-Touch Me” and Curry’s bawdy showstopper, “Sweet Transvestite.”
Asked in the fall of 2025 how he would like to be remembered, Curry pointed to the film’s effect on its audience. “It’s given a lot of people permission to be themselves,” he told USA TODAY.
The Clown That Scared a Generation
Stephen King’s 1986 novel “It” became a two-part, four-hour ABC miniseries in 1990, and Curry’s Pennywise the Clown frightened a mass audience that reached more than 37 million households. Using a low, rasping growl and a New York accent, he upended every assumption about children’s entertainers. Director Tommy Lee Wallace said his own job was mostly to hand Curry the stage and then keep out of the way: “He was like Robin Williams in the way he brought a spontaneous improvisation to the part.”
Three Tony Nods and a Memoir
Broadway brought him three Tony nominations for best actor. The first came for creating the role of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the 1981 Broadway staging of “Amadeus,” a contest he lost to castmate Ian McKellen, who played Antonio Salieri. The second was for the alcoholic actor Alan Swann in “My Favorite Year,” which opened in December 1992, and the third for King Arthur in Monty Python’s “Spamalot” in 2005. He had committed to King Arthur back when the show tried out in Chicago in late 2004; he stayed with it on Broadway through 2005 and picked it up again in the West End the following year.
A startling range marked his screen work. He was the swindler Rooster Hannigan in 1982’s “Annie,” with Carol Burnett as Miss Hannigan and Aileen Quinn in the title role, and the unflappable butler Wadsworth in 1985’s “Clue,” alongside Madeline Kahn and Christopher Lloyd. That same year he played the horned, tomato-red Lord of Darkness opposite Tom Cruise in Ridley Scott’s “Legend.” Later came Long John Silver in 1996’s “Muppet Treasure Island,” a suspicious Plaza Hotel concierge in “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” and Gomez Addams in 1998’s “Addams Family Reunion.” He also turned up in “The Hunt for Red October,” “Kinsey,” “The Three Musketeers,” “Scary Movie 2,” the 1995 thriller “Congo,” “Oliver Twist,” and “Will & Grace.” His own favorites were “Clue” and 1991’s “Oscar”; that screwball comedy starred Sylvester Stallone and cast Curry as dialectician Dr. Thornton Poole opposite Marisa Tomei. The horror film “Stream” marked his return after years away, and it reached theaters in August 2024.
A career of its own was sustained by his voice. Three albums arrived between the late 1970s and the early ’80s, mixing original rock songs with covers, among them Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell numbers; a Grammy nomination followed his audiobook narration of Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Younger audiences met him as a meme through his bombastic Soviet Premier Anatoly Cherdenko in the 2008 video game “Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3,” one clip of which surpassed 10 million views on YouTube. There were no children, and Curry never married; in his memoir, “Vagabond,” which he promoted on “CBS Sunday Morning” in October 2025, he wrote that he had loved and been loved.
Tributes From Stage and Screen
Burnett shared a clip of Curry playing her smarmy brother in “Annie” alongside co-star Bernadette Peters, writing on social media that “nobody could play lovable villains better than he could.” A bright, fierce flame was how Luke Evans, the Welsh actor who originated the role of Frank-N-Furter in the current Broadway revival, described Curry; among the greatest compliments he had received, Evans wrote, was being compared to him. Evans went back onstage on August 26 with Paul Soileau, who plays the role now, and Jake Shears, who takes it over in September, and the three performed together “I’m Going Home” in Curry’s memory. Soileau used a curtain speech to push back on the obituaries: “If you trace it all back 53 years ago, there’s one home and one vessel that Frank-N-Furter would actually call home, and it’s Tim Curry.” Curry died the same day as Dolly Parton, a coincidence that drew wide comment. Both were 80, born three months apart in 1946.