Once Tim Curry was a towering icon of glam-rock. Now he's lucky to work with a four-foot latex puppet. So what went wrong?
It's as pathetically weak-minded as believing that Julie Goodyear really is a barmaid. But when Tim Curry opens his front door, you somehow expect him to be wearing six-inch silver stacked heels, fishnets, a black diamante basque and a ruby-red pout which will have you in bed in no time at all with Brad, Janet and goodness knows who else. Curry didn't just play Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, he embodied him. It's 23 years since he strutted to fame like some rock 'n' roll Joan Crawford: down the King's Road from the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court to the now torn-down Coronet, and thence to Hollywood. But despite everything he's done since on stage, TV and in film, you still think of him as the 'sweet transvestite from Transylvania'. And that drives him mad.
It's the problem of creating an icon. The mantra of The Rocky Horror Show was "Don't dream it, be it", and it hit the G-spot of the sexually omnivorous and opportunistic times. Glam met rock, cross-dressed it, slept with it and taught the audience all the tunes. Curry's Frank-N-Furter had a sexuality on screen that wasn't merely liberated but, talking down the camera directly to the audience, invited complicity. Men and women just fell for him.
Trashily wrapped up in a B-movie pastiche, the show was a delicious assault on Mom and Dad and Apple Pie and was guaranteed to seduce anyone under 25 away from the straight and narrow. And not only was it a popular success but a fashionable one, too. Even Mick Jagger couldn't get a ticket for the last night in London. But a few months later, there he was for the opening night at The Roxy on Sunset Boulevard, sitting in the front row with John Lennon and the rest of the rock 'n' roll hip-ocracy.
Staying in a $600-a-month apartment in The Chateau Marmont in 1974, Curry had crash-landed in Los Angeles at the head of a sexual charge. But it was a role which left him bruised and battered and from which, in some ways, it has taken him until now to recover.
Of course, when he does open his front door, all high-heeled expectations are defeated. He is dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, and despite the heels of his patterned, sharp-toed, also black, cowboy boots, he is shorter and stockier than you'd expect. He is articulate, witty, clever and literate. On the hall table are a batch of new books: Peter Ackroyd's biography of Blake, Will Self's Grey Area, Stories By Vladimir Nabokov, The Autobiography Of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle. And that's just this week's reading.
He moved to LA permanently in 1988 after completing the US tour of the musical Me And My Girl. He has now settled in a house in Los Feliz, the oldest area of LA, that he bought two years ago and which was built in 1922. He describes California as often looking like "a low-rent Tuscany", and inside his home old Italy meets English country. The rooms are calm, dark wood giving them a slightly sombre air. The furniture, the ornaments and the paintings, so many that some of them are on the floor leaning against the walls, all give the house the feeling of being furnished with experiences, a probably permanent pause in a hitherto peripatetic life. It doesn't seem like a house inhabited by an actor who rushes in, dumps his bags, re-packs, turns round and races off to another shoot. Instead you feel he takes time off from living at home to go out to work.
He describes that work in American movies as just "showing up and preferably in films that a lot of people go and see". There is a great tradition of typecasting English actors in Hollywood (which he parodies in his customary greeting to Eric Idle: "Butler or Villain?"). Brits tend to be used for malevolence or plot-driving and Curry's style has led him strongly towards the former. "The characters I have played tend to be grimly larger than life. A lot of actors are content to be overheard," he says, referring to the trend for meaningful mumbling among the currently fashionable studs, "whereas I tend to speak up. And this face is writ pretty large, really." At 50 he's an actor in search of a breakthrough character part, which is not an unreasonable expectation when you remember that before Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins was doing Jackie Collins TV miniseries. Curry hasn't had to suffer that indignity but how wide has his choice been? "Everyone assumes that you sit at home with a great pile of scripts you're sifting through, saying: 'Yes,' 'Maybe' and 'No, I don't think so'. And actors tend to like you to buy into that scenario. I take the best of what's offered but it's not as if one is pelted with opportunities. That's the reality for most people in Hollywood."
What he has found so far has gained him a reputation for versatility and, according to one studio executive, a $500,000 price tag. In 12 or so movies, the parts have ranged from Paramount's biggest earner last year, Congo (which, despite its $81 million at the US box office was dismissed by the critics), to the monumental Legend in 1985; from competing dimple to dimple with Macaulay Culkin, as the martinet desk clerk in Home Alone 2 in 1992, to using his role as Cardinal Richelieu to steal the 1993 re-make of The Three Musketeers from his brat pack co-stars. The Screen Actors Handbook sums him up as "huge range, difficult to cast", and he agrees.
Curry was born in 1946 and from about the age of 14 or 15 he knew he wanted to be an actor. His father was a naval chaplain so the family moved every 18 months. He went to a boarding school, Kingswood, which had a strong liberal arts tradition and he was always appearing in plays. "Acting was a separate reality and a more inviting one." Was he frightened as a kid then? "No, but when I was 12 my father died from pneumonia following two strokes. It was an extremely violent thing to happen. If you lose a parent when you are embarking on adolescence, from that moment on you know too much. A major part of your innocence is taken away. After that, my friends were always older than me."
Ian McKellen, with whom Curry co-starred as Mozart in the 1981 Tony award-winning Amadeus on Broadway, remembers him when he first started acting after graduating in English and Drama from Birmingham University at the end of the Sixties. "He used to come to parties I gave at Christmas and was always the little boy in the corner who was a slight strain to talk to because he never opened his mouth. He was very tentative and private and perhaps rather wry about the company. As long as I've known him, he's kept those moments when he lets his hair down to the times when he actually wants to do it."
Frank-N-Furter was clearly one of those moments, though it didn't just stand alone. It came out of something earlier. Living in the Notting Hill flat he now remembers as "being full of junkies, where you had to wash the blood off the walls before you could have a bath", Curry sold leather belts in the market and eventually joined the touring production of Hair. "I wanted to do the Sodomy, Fellatio... song but I ended up just jumping up and down at the back as part of the troupe. It was a very peculiar production. People just didn't turn up if they were a bit stoned or they thought they'd stay home. But I was a real trouper. I always showed up." There's an air of boyish enthusiasm now as he sits on the floor in his drawing-room, smoking Marlboros constantly and recounting those days. "I was so thrilled to be doing it at all. I went to university but never drama school. So this was drama school for me."
In 1970 he went to the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, where they did an all-male production of Genet's The Maids. Sue Blane, the Rocky Horror costume designer, was there too, and the corset eventually worn by Frank-N-Furter in London was bought by the two of them in the Barras, the market in the East End of Glasgow. "I wore it back-to-front in The Maids with some terrible kind of skirt, rubber gloves and track marks down my arms. So for Frank there was a vernacular already handy." On stage and on screen, Frank-N-Furter took up only two years of Curry's life but it has dominated everything personally and professionally since. When it started in London, it was just the fifth in a line of shows he had done at the Royal Court. But it transformed itself from fringe to worldwide cult with the canny release of the movie as a midnight matinee, first in New York and then wherever students could acquire a dab of slap and an ounce of pre-orgasmic curiosity.
Twenty one years later, Curry's mailbag testifies it still has no sell-by date. "There is an annual raft of college kids, many of whom are at the point where they are deeply curious about their sexuality. And in the film they can see most varieties of it presented with a kind of muscular innocence and joy. It's a celebration. It's a key to a door. And a very useful one." But however much it helps the undergraduates of Des Moines, Dundee or Durban, it caused havoc with Curry.
Talking about it now is still an intense experience for him. It is clear that, as he tries to be truthful about it, he has to go back over things he feels he's beginning to put behind him and from which he would rather move on. The fact that he finds it painful to talk about is the reason why this is the first big interview he's agreed to for over a decade. Now the rest of us mortals have limited sympathy for the troubles of stardom. But Curry's dilemmas are more interesting. Frank-N-Furter eventually terrified him. And, slightly gnomically, he explains why: "It was totally bewildering. It's no fun being an icon because...", becoming quieter, more deliberate, more careful, "it's hard for people to separate the performance from the person. There are people out there who thrive on divas and icons. They want people to be 100 per cent extraordinary. But iconography is dangerous ground because people are always reading these ******* runes and I have to read them, too, and please, I would like to have a life."
It was the only time he swore. The irony is that, although he resents such personal intrusion, it was exactly what his performance invited. For that, and possibly other reasons, he doesn't entertain direct questions about his sexuality, wherein lies something of a contradiction as you're only asking them because of Frank-N-Furter. "Sexuality seems to me to be a very private thing and I think Frank was a strong and sufficient statement. I'm not interested in banners or clouds of glory. People assumed I was Frank and eventually I reacted so strongly against it, I became chubby and plain." He laughs again.
The upshot of chubbiness and plainness was to hurtle between London, New York and LA doing theatre, films and TV for 14 years. He had rented apartments in all three cities but had a home in none of them. He worked almost constantly and, as well as some classy British telly parts, he appeared on stage in Travesties and Amadeus in New York, in The Pirates Of Penzance in the West End and in several shows in Sir Peter Hall's final season at the National Theatre in 1985-86. He made films, co-starring with Jonathan Pryce in The Ploughman's Lunch, Tom Cruise in Legend and Christopher Lloyd in Clue. He also recorded two rock albums. Chubby, plain and running just fast enough to remain uncommitted.
Then he finally settled in LA, and now in this house. He lives alone. He says he likes it and you believe him. He may be solitary but he is gregarious and, according to his friends, a great host. But, as Ian McKellen says, "He's not out at parties. He's much more likely to be at home reading with his dog, which is not an easy thing to do in California, because that way you're not so much in the swim." In fact he detests "the swim".
On Oscar night he took me to one of the main parties, given by Vanity Fair magazine. He did it because he thought I'd enjoy it. He was right. He, for his part, spent most of the time hiding under an enormous pot plant. Meanwhile, fellow Hollywood Brit Richard E. Grant left us and ran around the room like a dog in a park looking for a better bottom to sniff. Curry didn't say anything but his distaste and embarrassment were palpable. On the way in, he had done the obligatory red-carpet photo parade and microphone sound-bitery. He was charming and looked comfortable. Did he still enjoy it, then? "Still?" he looked bemused. It just had to be done. Part of the game. Let's go home now.
Oscar night did offer Curry a reason to celebrate though. According to the next day's Variety, his latest movie was taking more per week at the box office than the highly successful pork-pic Babe. And his part in it may mark something of a turning point, not least because it indicates a change in the way he is perceived by one of the main studios. He is Long John Silver in the latest Muppet movie, Muppet Treasure Island. The film is a delight, and his Silver is wonderful.
Brian Henson, the film's director, had wanted to work with him for a long time and had particularly wanted to cast him in his previous movie for Disney, The Muppet Christmas Carol. But Disney were wary and gave the part to a more family-film kind of guy, Michael Caine. Since then, though, Curry has become friends with David Vogel, the president of Walt Disney Pictures, and, in Henson's words, "Vogel became open to the idea of Tim". He was no longer the "sweet transvestite" of a film that Brian Henson says is still thought of "as having been a tremendous risk for Hollywood".
Curry's performance, too, is different in tone. It has no hint of grand guignol and no shadow of Frank. Underplayed, there is no "ooh-aargh-Jim-lad" pantomime exaggeration. For Curry it has some poignancy, too. "There is a scene where they talk about the young Jim's father dying, where Jim has come to trust Silver. And that's pretty interesting for me because that experience was central to my life." During the illness that led up to his death, his father created a garden from scratch. "I think if you're English, a trowel appears in your hand when you're 30 like a prosthetic device." The 50-year-old Curry is now engaged in creating his own garden. It rises up at the back of the house in a natural bowl. Most of the original features from the Twenties, the two sarcophagi benches whose tiles tell the story of Don Juan, the lagoon swimming-pool and the water cascade which runs all the way down the middle and is operated by a tap in the kitchen, are all still there. He is uncovering them and planting new flowers and shrubs around the 75-year-old palm trees. He calls it "his obsession" and the garden is clearly significant.
"Actually, to commit to a place like I'm doing with this garden, is a big deal for me." Curry seems ready for a new phase in his life. He wants to work in English theatre again, "I'd like some more meat on the bone, please", maybe make a jazz album, and tend his garden. Probably all of that in reverse order. He's refreshed and quite sure that "it's time to put the spurs on again".
"When I was a teenager," he says, "I remember sitting down with my best friend from school under a tree in Spain with a large bottle of Thundador and swearing to explore our contradictions to the end." And you think that this time, with a real home life, if he does start to explore his contradictions, he might just manage it without getting "chubby and plain" again.
Many thanks to Salome Brant for lovingly typing this.
Copyright belongs to the British Newspaper in which it appeared and to Mr. Fanshawe.