(Credits: Far Out / Tim Curry / Press)
Fri 19 December 2025 10:00, UK
There’s arguably no better example of ‘biggest cult actor’ than Tim Curry.
He also happens to be the star of the ‘biggest cult film’, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now 50 years old, Curry had been strutting Dr Frank-N-Furter’s corset and stockings previously in the original stage production, but the comedy-horror musical’s jump to the big screen immortalised Curry from the get-go, his preening alien transvestite and mad scientist one of the lauded icons of the LGBTQ+ landscape ever since.
Curry’s often the best thing in a filmography littered with work of variable quality. 1990’s two-part It TV movie is an otherwise tepid horror fare saved by his gripping portrayal of the child-devouring clown, Pennywise, Ridley Scott’s admirable but inconsistent Legend fantasy enjoys serious heavy lifting by Curry’s demonic, massive, horned Darkness villain, and his turn as Wadsworth the butler in the Clue boardgame feature is an understated but memorable presence among the comedy cast.
A peek into his musical life was offered back in 2019. Participating in a ‘My Favourite Things’ post on his Instagram, Curry reeled off the shows, artists, and albums he cherished the most to the eager attention of his dedicated fanbase.
It’s a solid question that always yields an interesting answer: “Do you remember the first record you bought?” While typically exposing a sheepish admission to some abomination of pop back in our pre-teen folly, Curry reeled off with unflappable class Ella Fitzgerald’s swing cover of Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’, nabbed from Croydon’s HMV store at the tender age of 12.
Then there was the guilty pleasure. It’s hard to take Curry seriously on this one, as the supposedly sorry secret he keeps close to his chest is 1963’s A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, the festive pop record from the famed producer’s Wrecking Crew heyday. It can’t be possible that Curry’s taste is so on point that he opts for the finest Yuletide record of the 20th century’s second half as his diffident delight, an album that The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson has confessed to standing as his “favourite album ever.”
Presented with the mammoth task of picking just one figure from the vast world of music, cinema, literature, and the arts, Curry singles out David Bowie as his archetypal creative polymath, stating, “He’s literate and visceral. He’s also a master of form and transformation.”
An understandable pick, Bowie’s artistic evolution subsumed all manner of creative components far beyond the confines of pop music, colouring a perennial renewal, for the most part, of a showman versed in repurposing such influences in a manner that was exciting over merely intellectual. Such expertise carried Bowie as the defining star of the 1970s, no doubt setting an example that a young Curry was taking serious notes from.
Last, and perhaps most fundamental, was the music he always came back to. “I saw West Side Story with the original London cast in the late 1950s,” Curry recalled.
Adding, “It was on at London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre. So when I listen to the original Broadway production recording now, it reminds me why I want to do what I’m doing and why I wanted to do it in the first place.”
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