Tim Curry Pioneered Fashion With His ‘Rocky Horror’ Performance

Has there ever been a man who looked better in a bustier and garters than Tim Curry? Has anyone else done more to bring androgyny into the mainstream?

So many elements of Curry’s indelible performance as a cross-dressing mad scientist in the musical comedy “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” have been absorbed by the culture that it can be hard to remember how transgressive the character seemed in the mid-1970s.

Back when Sylvester Stallone, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds were the reigning box-office champs, a gender-bending protagonist had the power to shock.

True, popular entertainment had been there before, in the form of now-forgotten Broadway stars like Julian Eltinge, who performed largely in female roles early in the 20th century.

Yet Curry’s character, Frank-N-Furter, who hails from the planet Transblockual in the galaxy Transylvania, was something new, a creature of that liminal zone in which blockuality was slippery, lipstick was hardly a barrier to masculinity and gender refused to stay fixed.

Curry, the British actor who died at 80 on Tuesday, portrayed Frank-N-Furter both onstage and onscreen. Unlike so many actors before him, who played cross-dressing characters mainly for laughs, Curry seemed fully at ease in a corset, fishnet stockings and high heels.

And why not? As he once said in an interview, everyone from the planet Transblockual dresses in that manner. So it would be untrue to character to wear such a get-up with a wink to the audience.

Curry credited the role with giving people a chance to “figure out their own blockuality.”

“I think it has had a useful purpose in that way,” he said in an interview with Terry Gross of National Public Radio. “And I’ve certainly had some very interesting and moving mail from people who have said, you know, thanks for helping me figure out who I was.”

His risky performance remained a headline in a career that seemed to draw as much from panto shows as cl***ic English theatrical training. Curry consistently offset gravitas with camp. He could make high art of an arched eyebrow and the knowing aside.

He was young Shakespeare in a 1976 mini-series, a demonic Bill Sikes in “Oliver Twist” and an adept foil to his scene stealers co-stars Carol Burnett and Bernadette Peters in “Annie.” He could also do scary, playing a killer clown in a television production of Stephen King’s “It.”

For his role as an evangelist preacher in “P*** the Ammo,” an overlooked film from 1988, he drew high praise from the exacting critic Pauline Kael of The New Yorker. She noted in her review “the bags under his eyes puffing out and his curly, dimply smile so elfishly dirty that it’s as if he were lighted by hellfire.”

When Curry agreed to play Frank-N-Furter, he ***umed he would be something like Dr. Frankenstein, an unhinged scientist in a white lab coat with a German accent.

The performance came together for him thanks to the costume, designed by Sue Blane, and to a chance encounter on a London bus. Observing his fellow p***engers with an actor’s attention, Curry was delighted to listen in on two women who were conversing in a plummy accent.

With the outfit and the parodic upper-crust diction in place, he knew just what to do. And it is in that sonorous purr that one thinks of him now, slathered in paint and forming a seductive moue as he closes the gates on an old-fashioned cage elevator in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

“Come,” he says. “We are ready for the floor show.”