LOS ANGELES, CA - Timothy James Curry, the English actor who turned a midnight musical into a lifelong cult and then spent fifty years making villains, butlers, clowns and cartoons sound like nobody else, died Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at his home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles. He was 80. His longtime manager and friend Marcia Hurwitz said he died peacefully. No cause was given. A major stroke in 2012 put him in a wheelchair. He kept working anyway, and last fall he sat for the 50th anniversary of the picture that made him famous.
He was born April 19, 1946, in Grappenhall, Cheshire, England, a Navy chaplain’s son who sang in church as a boy and studied drama and English at the University of Birmingham. After Hair in London in 1968, a castmate named Richard O’Brien asked him to audition for a new show. Curry sang “Tutti Frutti” and walked out as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, first on a tiny London stage in 1973, then Los Angeles, then Broadway, then the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a flop that became a midnight ritual. He never quite shook the corset, and he never really tried to. He was Rooster Hannigan in Annie, Wadsworth the butler in Clue, Darkness in Ridley Scott’s Legend, Pennywise in the 1990 miniseries of Stephen King’s It, the concierge in Home Alone 2, Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers, and Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. Broadway nominated him for Tonys for Amadeus, My Favorite Year and Spamalot. Kids knew the voice: Captain Hook, Hexxus in FernGully, Sir Nigel Thornberry in The Wild Thornberrys, Palpatine in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
There were rock records, too, and a 2025 memoir, Vagabond, in which he wrote that he had known true love, true heartbreak and no small amount of wreckage, and that he did not fear death, he just tried to avoid it. He never married and left no immediate survivors. For a lot of people he will always be the sweet transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, doing the Time Warp. For a lot of others he will always be the clown in the storm drain. Either way, you heard him once and you never mixed him up with anybody else.
Sources: The New York Times · Associated Press · BBC · Variety