It’s a brisk night in downtown Boston in the early 1980s, and I’m out with a group that includes a very nice, very pretty young woman from my college whom I hope to get to know better. After dinner, one of the guys has an idea: a movie! Better yet, a midnight movie, after which, of course, we’d have to be gallant and walk the girls home. Ambling down Newbury Street to the Exeter Street Theater (now long gone), I spot an unexpected and sartorially strange crowd lined up around the corner. I am dressed like a basic preppy-wannabe: jeans, loafers, a button-down shirt. But the people lined up to get into this movie include men in heavy makeup and—wait, can this be?—garter belts. What the hell am I doing here?

The movie, of course, was the 1975 flop turned cult hit The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and audiences came dressed as their favorite character. Those tarted-up men were paying tribute to Tim Curry’s bizarrely glorious Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who belts out a song about being a “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania.” I may have been a youthful Republican, but I knew that I was watching something—and someone—amazing. I saw the movie many more times, and although I wasn’t going in drag (if you know Rocky Horror, I was more the Brad Majors type), Curry’s pure, perverse joy on-screen was always a welcome escape.

The English actor died today at 80. In a perfect tribute, Curry’s many fans are happily debating his greatest performances, which is remarkable given that he wasn’t in that many films and was rarely the lead. Yet his charisma ensured a loyal following for generations.

Patricia Quinn, Tim Curry, and Nell Campbell in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (20th Century Fox / Everett Collection)

Curry’s magic lay in his ability to be outrageous without being self-conscious, but which Curry you love most might depend on your age and genre preferences. After catching the first wave with Rocky Horror, I went on to buy one of the few albums he made as an aspiring rock star. (“I Do the Rock” should have gotten more love.) I was among the audiences who were mesmerized by his 1985 performance as a demon, under a ton of makeup, in Legend. Five years later, he scared a new generation as Pennywise the Clown in an adaptation of Stephen King’s It, a role Curry stamped as his own. Other moviegoers adored his campy but somehow restrained mania as the butler in Clue, or delighted in his nasty smarm as the concierge in Home Alone 2.

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Finding Curry in something was always a treat. But it was particularly special for me, as someone who worked in Russian affairs, when I discovered that he had traded his pumps and pearls for the severe tunic of a Soviet naval officer in The Hunt for Red October. Curry played the clueless medical officer Dr. Petrov, who does not realize that his skipper, Captain Ramius (played by Sean Connery), intends to defect to the West. When Ramius appears to valiantly order Petrov off the boat and says that, as captain, he himself must go down with the ship after “fighting” the Americans, Curry, trembling with admiration, says, “You’ll receive the Order of Lenin for this, Captain.” His is a simple line, but Curry’s combination of posh earnestness and wide-eyed gullibility turns this into a gem of a moment, something that only he could pull off.

What was it about Curry that endeared him to so many? Unlike Dolly Parton, who is rightly being mourned as a great American, Curry was far less a public person. He never married. Despite playing the most decadent and flamboyant cross-dresser in the history of cinema, he never answered questions about his sexuality or his personal relationships. (“Respectfully,” he wrote in his 2025 memoir, such things are “none of your fucking business.”) He was known to be a charming and warm man, and he was involved with some charity efforts, but despite his extroversion as a performer, he was not an off-screen supernova.

Instead, Curry connected with fans like me because, as a performer, the man seemed able to do anything, and do it with a kind of liberated abandon and eagerness to entertain. (He said later that he put so much energy into his performance in Clue that the nurse on set warned him that he was at risk of having a heart attack.) A prancing, snide alien in women’s underwear who talks like an upper-class London lord? Sure, he could do that. How about an exuberant and hilarious turn as Long John Silver with a cast of Muppets? Of course. And as a Russian villain in the dreadful remake of McHale’s Navy, he single-handedly made the movie (or at least some of it) worth watching.

His distinctive voice and knack for accents also ensured him gigs in cartoons and video games, including as the Soviet premier Cherdenko in the alternate-history video game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. (What was it with him and Russians?) Many famous actors have appeared in video games, but with uneven results; instead of phoning it in, Curry joined the small band of stars who acted in video games and elevated what could have been throwaway scenes into memorably fun mini-movies.

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Curry’s gifts usually made more of an impression on audiences than on film critics, and most of his award nominations were for stage roles. Yet his rich voice and easy charm lent even the cheesiest lines a kind of Shakespearian seriousness, and watching him was like having an expensive meal and comfort food at the same time. Maybe that’s what was so appealing about Curry: He was a guilty pleasure, but without the guilt. You knew you were watching a great actor, regardless of the script.

Curry always seemed to be having a great time in every role, and he seemed to want audiences to have a great time too. As Frank-N-Furter would say, “There’s no crime in giving yourself over to pleasure.” When Tim Curry was on-screen, nothing was easier.