Tim Curry, the British actor whose death at 80 was reported Wednesday, understood the secret pleasure of the villain: heroes had to save the world, but villains could enjoy themselves in it. In Curry’s hands, wickedness acquired wit, appetite and a certain dangerous hospitality. He made evil look like the livelier party we should all want to be invited to.
Before most of those villains, though, there was Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show that made Curry famous and fixed his gift for magnificent excess in the public imagination. Frank-N-Furter was less a conventional villain than a creature of appetite, vanity, danger and showmanship, and Curry used that to establish something that would follow him for decades: the person behaving worst could also be the person you could not stop watching.
Every later rogue seemed to carry a little bit of that with him. His death came after a career spanning different media and a major stroke in 2012 that curtailed much of his screen work. But what he has done remains everlasting.
He built an unusual gallery of rogues whose wickedness was seldom gray or solemn and certainly never boring. Curry treated villainy as sweet, sweet theater, with Ridley Scott's Legend offering the purest version of the form. As Darkness, Curry was buried beneath towering horns, red prosthetics, hooves and contact lenses that left little of his face available to act with.
In his biography, the actor described how the costume effectively left him with his voice as his principal instrument. In response, Curry made every syllable sound as if temptation had been polished for centuries. Darkness may have been the monster, yet he possessed the movie's gravitational pull.
You just couldn’t look away from the villain, which Curry turned into a figure that did more than threaten the hero. He offered the audience a forbidden alternative to “the good guy,” asking us to abandon restraint to see what would happen. He had already practiced a comic variation in 1982's Annie, playing Rooster Hannigan, the hustler who joins Miss Hannigan and Lily St.
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