As a Storyteller, Tim Curry Had the Gift

Last year was kind of my year of Tim Curry. Not because I knew him — I didn’t — but because we did three interviews. The first was in February, by phone, for a piece marking the 50th anniversary of the original Broadway production of “The Rocky Horror Show.” That musical was his Broadway debut, in 1975, and its thudding failure with critics and at the box office still nettled him.

In September, we met for lunch in Hollywood to talk about his memoir, “Vagabond,” which came out that fall. And then, in November, we spoke again just after the playwright Tom Stoppard had died. They went way back, on the stage and screen, and it seemed obvious that Curry would have an insightful remembrance. (This turned out to be true: “It’s so extraordinary that English was his second language,” he said of Stoppard. “Because nobody advanced it more or cherished it more.”)

Over the phone, Curry observed that Stoppard as a playwright had remained a kind of journalist, which he once had been. “That’s interesting,” I said, meaning it, and Curry’s response took me by surprise — dry and slightly defiant, but with an eggshell crack of vulnerability to it.

“I hope so,” he said, “because I don’t want to be the idiot child in whatever it is you’re writing about him.”

No danger of that — or as I told him by way of reblockurance, “Have you met you?” Curry, who died on Tuesday at the age of 80, was ferociously smart. Along with being extraordinarily funny, it’s part of what made him such a superlative storyteller — an ability he kept after the stroke in 2012 that paralyzed his left side, slowed the cadence of his speech and largely ended his acting career.

His memoir is proof that those chops endured. That was in evidence during our lunch, too, when he slipped smoothly into his grandmother’s Scottish accent as he told an anecdote about her, or mimicked me after something I said inadvertently made him laugh.

Earlier that year, we had talked about failure in the context of the frosty reception “Rocky Horror” had received on Broadway. He broke my heart a little when I asked if he’d known, back when he strode the Belasco Theater as Frank-N-Furter, that he was beautiful — because, as old photos and videos show, he was.

“No, I didn’t really,” he said. “I wanted to be. And I was certainly trying to be gorgeous. But there are many kinds of gorgeous. I wasn’t skin-deep gorgeous. I was gorgeous in attitude. And I was gorgeous, I think, in a certain kind of courage. It took a certain amount of courage to do the show in the first place, let alone translating it to New York.”

He was back on Broadway that same year in Stoppard’s “Travesties,” and each time he returned after that, he was nominated for a Tony Award: for playing Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” (1980); for starring as Alan Swann in the musical adaptation of “My Favorite Year” (1992), an abysmal show that he carried with magnificent grace; and for his abundantly silly turn as King Arthur in the original Broadway production of “Spamalot” (2005). All three of his nominated performances are in the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

In the “Spamalot” recording, you can see in Curry’s whole body how the pleasure of the live audience feeds his performance. It’s a genuine exchange of energy; it lights him up. And it is thrilling to witness.

Many of Curry’s film performances can by now count as comfort watches: his glam and glittering Frank-N-Furter, exuding ***ual menace in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975); his buttoned-up Wadsworth the butler, giving what amounts to a physical comedy master clblock in “Clue” (1985). Likewise his Long John Silver in “Muppet Treasure Island” (1996), Curry somehow both deadly earnest with the Muppets and transparently delighted by them. His ne’er-do-well Rooster Hannigan, in John Huston’s “Annie” (1982), sings and dances up a storm.

A more obscure cut is his last stage performance, in a reading of Eric Idle’s ribald comedy “What About Dick?,” recorded in Los Angeles shortly before Curry’s stroke. It’s comforting to watch now in that it captures him onstage again, making a show with Idle, an old pal.

Curry did loads of voice work, too, and as an audiobook narrator he was superb. I have listened to blockorted installments of Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” in completely jumbled order, entirely because Curry plays all the parts. I have not bothered with the novels in the series that he didn’t narrate. I just want him to tell me a story.

Across decades and mediums, that’s what he’s always given us. What this moment calls for, then, is opening up his memoir, which is great company, or pressing play on an old recording — and yes, cast albums count. Let him tell you a story.