Horror lost one of its true giants this week. Tim Curry passed away peacefully at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles on Tuesday, August 25th, at the age of 80, his longtime manager Marcia Hurwitz confirmed, per Variety. No cause of death has been disclosed.
"Throughout his life, he refused to be boxed in or confined to others' expectations," Hurwitz said in her statement, adding that "though he suffered a debilitating stroke in 2012, he continued adding to his achievements as an artist and, most recently, a writer."
For horror fans, one role towers above the rest. In 1990, ABC aired IT as a two-night television event, and Curry's Pennywise walked out of Stephen King's pages and into the nightmares of an entire generation. He did it with almost nothing: no digital effects, no elaborate transformations for most of his screen time, just a clown suit, a painted grin, and a voice that could turn "they all float down here" into the scariest sentence on television. Nearly 30 million viewers tuned in, and an entire generation grew up afraid of clowns because of that performance.
When Andy Muschietti's 2017 film brought Pennywise back to the screen, Bill Skarsgard stepped into the role with buckets of modern makeup and CGI behind him, and the comparison every reviewer used was Curry. 27 years later, HIS was still the performance to beat.
Pennywise wasn't even his most famous monster. Curry originated Dr. Frank-N-Furter on the London stage in 1973 and immortalized him in 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the film that invented the midnight movie as we know it. The picture famously bombed on its 1975 release before midnight audiences resurrected it, and fifty years on, shadow casts still perform it in theaters every weekend, in fishnets, doing the Time Warp, because of what Curry did in that role. It's the longest-running theatrical release in film history, due in large part to his performance.
Born in Grappenhall, Cheshire in 1946, the son of a Methodist Navy chaplain, Curry was a classically trained stage actor before Hollywood found him, and he kept finding his way back to theater throughout his career. He earned three Tony nominations across three decades, for Amadeus, My Favorite Year, and his King Arthur in Spamalot.
He spent hours in Rob Bottin's makeup chair to play Darkness in Ridley Scott's Legend (1985), still the screen's most iconic devil, an experience with prosthetics so grueling it famously soured him on heavy makeup, which makes the bare-faced menace of his Pennywise all the more remarkable.
He anchored the horror-adjacent cult classic Clue as Wadsworth the butler that same year. He voiced Hexxus, the oil-slick demon of FernGully, terrified kids as the Cardinal in The Three Musketeers, menaced Kevin McCallister as the concierge in Home Alone 2, and gave the Muppet Treasure Island generation its definitive Long John Silver. Even his kids' work had teeth: an entire wave of young viewers met him as the Grand Wizard in The Worst Witch, the 1986 Halloween oddity that resurfaces every October.
The 2012 stroke left him using a wheelchair, and he kept right on working: voice roles, fan conventions, anniversary celebrations where Rocky Horror fans lined up for hours just to say thank you. By every account he loved those rooms.
Pennywise will return, as he always does. The character lives on in IT: Welcome to Derry, and Rocky Horror will be playing at midnight somewhere this Saturday.
Our thoughts are with his family, his friends, and every fan who ever floated.
What's the Tim Curry performance that got under your skin first?
Share your memories in the comments below.
Want To Dig Deeper?