The Five People I Was Most Fond Of: Tim Curry Looks Back on a Life in Acting

“I was rather a purist about my work and about acting. There were people—they know who they are—who were really just a kind of star personality and never truly disappeared into a role. I wanted to disappear into characters. I didn’t want an audience to say, ‘Oh, thank God, here he is.’”

People sometimes ask me who I enjoyed working with the most. That’s actually quite difficult to answer because I’ve worked with an awful lot of people, and I’ve been lucky with most of them.

But there’s another question I find much easier.

Who do I remember as being different?

There are people you work with for six months and barely think about again. Then there are people you haven’t seen for years, but somebody mentions their name and immediately you’re back there. You remember a dinner, a rehearsal, a stupid joke, something they said to you thirty years ago.

I’ve got quite a few people like that.

Theater gave me some of them. Films gave me others. And then there were people I met simply because we happened to be living in the same strange little world.

So these aren’t necessarily the five most important people I ever met. I wouldn’t know how to make a list like that. They’re simply five people I was very fond of. And when I think about different parts of my life, somehow they’re still there.

Carol Burnett: The Person Who Made Everything Easier

The first person I want to talk about is Carol Burnett.

Carol was one of those people who made everything easier.

We worked together on Annie, and I remember thinking very early on that Carol was exactly what you hoped she would be. She was funny. Obviously, everybody knew that. But she wasn’t walking around all day trying to prove how funny she was.

That’s what I liked about her.

Carol could be sitting there perfectly quietly, listening to somebody talk, and then she’d say one thing and everybody would lose it.

We were playing these rather dreadful people in Annie. Carol was Miss Hannigan, I was Rooster, and Bernadette Peters played Lily. The three of us spent quite a lot of time together, and honestly, it was difficult not to have fun.

We were supposed to be villains.

We certainly didn’t behave like villains once the cameras stopped.

By then, Carol had been enormously famous for years. The Carol Burnett Show had made her a household name in America. But you never felt any of that when you were actually talking to her.

There are famous people who make sure you know they’re famous.

Carol wasn’t one of them.

She came to work. She knew what she was doing. She was generous with the other actors. And if something was funny, she enjoyed it. There wasn’t much ego involved.

I always appreciated that.

Comedy can become terribly competitive if you’re not careful. Somebody wants the bigger laugh. Somebody wants the better line. Somebody starts counting how many jokes everybody else has.

Carol didn’t need to do any of that.

She already knew who she was.

And I think that made everybody around her more relaxed.

When people mention Annie to me, they usually remember the songs or the costumes or that enormous house. I remember those things too, of course, but mostly I remember laughing.

I remember Carol.

I remember Bernadette.

I remember the three of us being given permission to be completely horrible on screen and having a wonderful time doing it.

You don’t always stay close to everyone you work with. That’s just life. People finish a film and go somewhere else.

But you remember how somebody made you feel when you were around them.

Carol made work feel easy.

And that’s why, when I think about the people I was genuinely fond of, Carol Burnett is one of the first names that comes back to me.

Susan Sarandon: Before Anyone Knew What Rocky Horror Would Become

Susan Sarandon came into my life before The Rocky Horror Picture Show became this enormous thing.

That’s important because people look back at it now and think we all knew exactly what we were making.

We didn’t.

Nobody did.

Susan and I already knew each other before she became Janet. We were friends, and when they were looking for someone for the part, I encouraged her to go in and read for it.

She wasn’t terribly convinced. I think that’s fair to say.

Susan wasn’t really a musical-theater person. She’d heard about the show, so she knew I was doing it, but I don’t think playing Janet was something she’d been sitting at home dreaming about.

Then she came in.

And she got the part.

What I liked about Susan was that she never seemed intimidated by the madness around her.

And there was plenty of madness.

Rocky Horror was cheap. It was cold. It was strange. Half the time, I think everybody was wondering what on earth we were doing.

Susan just got on with it.

She was very smart, very direct, and she had a good sense of humor about the whole thing. You needed that on Rocky Horror. If you took any of it too seriously, you were probably in the wrong film.

And then, of course, something happened that none of us expected.

The film refused to disappear.

Years went by and people were still watching it. Then their children were watching it. People dressed as us. They shouted lines at the screen. They knew things about the film that I’d completely forgotten.

Susan and I would always be connected because of that.

But when I think of her, I don’t immediately think about Janet standing in the laboratory.

I think about the person I knew before all of that happened.

That’s the funny thing about fame. The public remembers the moment somebody became famous. You remember what they were like five minutes before.

Susan went on to have an extraordinary career, and I was always pleased to see it because she was good.

Really good.

And she never needed anybody to tell her that.

We were young actors making a peculiar little film together. Nobody was talking about cult classics. Nobody was talking about legacy.

We were just working.

Sometimes those are the people you remember most clearly—the ones who were there before anybody knew the story was going to become a story.

Ian McKellen: The Joy of Having to Stay Awake

Ian McKellen goes back a long way, long before Rocky Horror, actually.

We were both knocking around the theater world in Britain. Ian was somebody I knew before most people had any idea who I was.

I used to see him socially as well—Christmas parties, theater gatherings, that sort of thing.

I was probably quieter in those days than people imagine.

Ian certainly remembered me that way.

Then, years later, we found ourselves together in Amadeus.

Ian was Salieri. I was Mozart.

And that was a very different experience from Rocky Horror.

There were no fishnets, no outrageous makeup, no people throwing toast at the stage.

It was just two actors going at each other every night.

And I loved it.

Ian was wonderful to work opposite because you always knew he was completely there. You couldn’t drift through a scene with Ian.

He was listening.

He was watching.

And if you gave him something slightly different, he’d give you something back.

That keeps you awake.

It also keeps the work interesting when you’re doing the same play night after night.

People sometimes ask whether there was competition between us because we were both nominated for the Tony that year.

Ian won, and quite rightly too.

I don’t remember sitting around being terribly wounded about it. I was having far too good a time playing Mozart.

Amadeus became one of my favorite things I ever did on stage, and Ian is a large part of how I remember that period.

The nice thing is that our paths crossed again.

Years later, we both appeared in The Shadow.

By then, we’d lived a bit more, worked a bit more, and suddenly there was Ian again.

That’s what happens in this business.

You say goodbye to somebody after a production and assume that’s probably it.

Then fourteen years later, you walk onto a film set and there they are.

Ian later described it as renewing our partnership.

I liked that because that’s really what it felt like.

We didn’t need to start from the beginning.

There was already history there.

When you’ve known somebody from before all the success, before the famous roles, and before everybody starts putting titles in front of their name, you remember them differently.

To me, Ian wasn’t Sir Ian McKellen.

He was Ian.

An old friend.

And a bloody good actor.

Richard O’Brien: The Man Who Gave Me Frank

Richard O’Brien changed my life.

There’s really no clever way of putting it.

I knew Richard before Rocky Horror. We’d worked together on Hair, and then one day he had this strange little show he’d been writing.

And believe me, it was strange.

There was science fiction, old horror films, rock and roll, sex, a castle, and a bloke in fishnets.

You can imagine how easy that was to explain to people.

But Richard understood that world completely.

When I first started working on Frank, I didn’t immediately know what he should be. I tried different voices, different ways of moving.

Then eventually I found that voice—that rather exaggerated upper-class English voice—and suddenly the character started making sense.

Richard gave me room to find him.

That mattered.

A writer can become very protective of something he’s created. They can tell you exactly how every line should sound and where every laugh should come.

Richard wasn’t like that with me.

He let me play.

And once Frank appeared, there was no putting the bloody man back in the box.

The original stage show became a success.

Then came the film.

And after that, everything became rather ridiculous.

At first, the film didn’t do terribly well.

Then people started turning up at midnight.

Then they started dressing like us.

Then they started shouting at the screen.

Years later, people were still doing it.

Richard and I would sometimes find ourselves talking about Rocky Horror again, and I think there was always a certain amusement about what had happened to this odd little thing we’d made.

Nobody could have planned it.

Certainly not us.

And that’s why Richard means more to me than simply being the man who wrote my most famous role.

We shared the beginning of something.

Before the midnight screenings, before the costumes, before people knew every line, there was just Richard’s idea and a group of actors trying to make it work.

He trusted me with Frank.

That one decision followed me for the rest of my life.

Now, I occasionally had complicated feelings about being recognized for Frank above everything else. I did other things, you know. Quite a few, actually.

But I never blamed Richard for that.

How could I?

He gave me one of the greatest opportunities an actor could possibly have.

And more importantly, he gave me a character I genuinely loved playing.

So when I think about Richard, I don’t just think about Rocky Horror.

I think about where we were before anybody cared about it.

Two young men working in theater, neither of us knowing what was coming.

And God, what a strange ride it turned out to be.

Freddie Mercury: The Man Behind the Legend

Freddie was different.

I think anybody who knew him would probably say that.

People remember Freddie on stage, of course.

The clothes.

The voice.

The way he could walk in front of 70,000 people and somehow make the whole place belong to him.

But that wasn’t really the Freddie I knew.

I knew him socially.

We had dinner together. We went to parties. We talked about ordinary things.

And one of the things I remember most clearly is that Freddie could be extremely funny.

Very quick.

You had to pay attention around him because if you said something stupid, he’d catch it immediately.

And I liked that.

There was no point pretending to be terribly important around Freddie.

He’d probably make fun of you before you’d finished the sentence.

I remember going over to his house once and doing some gardening for him.

Yes.

Gardening.

That usually surprises people.

They expect some enormous story involving Freddie Mercury and Tim Curry. Something outrageous must have happened.

No.

I did his garden.

I actually knew quite a lot about plants, and Freddie had this garden that needed some attention, so I helped him with it.

That’s the Freddie I remember.

Not always the man under the lights.

Just Freddie at home.

We were both performers, but I don’t remember our friendship being about comparing careers or talking endlessly about show business.

Thank God for that.

There are only so many conversations about the business one can survive.

Freddie was simply good company.

And I think that’s something people sometimes miss.

When somebody becomes as famous as he did, they stop being a person in everybody else’s mind.

They become Freddie Mercury—the mustache, Queen, Wembley, all of it.

But if you actually knew someone, your memories are usually much smaller.

A dinner.

A joke.

A conversation.

A garden.

That’s what stays.

When Freddie became ill, things changed very quickly.

And when he died, he was only 45.

That still seems terribly young.

There should have been more time.

More dinners.

More ridiculous conversations.

Probably more gardening.

But you don’t get to decide those things.

So when people ask me about Freddie, I don’t immediately think about the enormous crowds or the records.

Everybody else can remember those.

I remember the man I knew when there wasn’t an audience around.

He was funny.

He was generous.

He could be outrageous. Obviously, that part wasn’t invented.

But he could also just be Freddie.

And I was very fond of him.

That’s why, out of all the extraordinary people who passed through my life, Freddie is one I never really forgot.

What Matters When the Work Is Over

Looking back, I suppose I was very lucky.

You spend your life thinking about the next job.

That’s what actors do.

You finish one thing and immediately start worrying about whether anybody’s going to employ you again.

At least I did.

But after enough years, you don’t really remember your life as a list of jobs.

You remember the people who were standing next to you.

Carol made me laugh.

Susan reminds me of those early Rocky Horror days before any of us understood what that little film was going to become.

Ian takes me back to the theater, to Amadeus, to standing opposite somebody every night and knowing you’d better be awake because he certainly was.

Richard gave me Frank.

That’s quite a thing to give somebody.

And Freddie, well, Freddie reminds me that sometimes the biggest personalities have a very ordinary side that only their friends get to see.

That’s the part I miss.

People disappear from your life in different ways.

Sometimes you lose touch.

Sometimes they move away.

Sometimes they’re simply gone.

But the memories don’t disappear quite so easily.

I can still picture those rooms.

I can still hear certain conversations.

And I can still remember laughing at things that probably weren’t particularly funny in the first place.

That’s enough for me.

I’ve had the roles.

I’ve had the applause.

I’ve had people shouting lines from Rocky Horror at me for more years than I care to count.

And I’m grateful for all of it.

But if you ask me what mattered more—the work or the people—well, that’s easy.

The people.