Amy R. Marsh Author & Writer

Like millions of others around the world, I was saddened to hear of actor Tim Curry’s passing. One of the few people who can be said to have truly lived up to adjectives such as “legendary” and “iconic” (similar to Dolly Parton, who had passed the day before), Curry’s performance as Dr. Frankenfurter in Rocky Horror Picture Show (and the previous stage production) showed several generations of queer kids and weirdo kids how to “don’t dream it, be it.”

Yeah, there really was “a light over at the Frankenstein place!” and it blazed. It still blazes! Curry and the rest of the cast took Richard O’Brien’s work of warped genius and made it incandescent enough to light galaxies, but Curry himself was so succulent, so juicy, so beckoningly trans…….gressive! that everyone wanted him–even teenage girls who had thought they were straight. I believe his sex appeal was one of the major reasons for repeat audiences.

I am old enough to remember when that movie first appeared, and how it was something that spoke loudly to so many of us, displaying sex and gender options and an aesthetic that had formerly lurked in marginalized corners of culture: the stranger strains of rock and roll, burbling up in glitter, glam, and punk; gay dance clubs; horror camp; fashion–it was all there in recombinant cultural DNA worthy of a mad scientist’s next dubious experiment. In fact, by the end of the movie, if we were hooked at all, we found ourselves morphed into glad creatures of Frankenfurter’s transformational lab.

It’s a little staggering to look back at my own life and see how much of my life contained or echoed references to Rocky Horror, particularly as the aesthetic endured. I even plucked the name of my podcast, Fantasy Free Me, from a line in “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again.” (And, I can admit here that I find Richard O’Brien as Riff Raff strangely attractive as he wipes a glazed donut on his coat and offers it to Brad… a covert sexual invitation if I ever saw one, but it flew under Janet’s radar. Sly humor abounds! Yes, there was something for nearly everyone in that movie. But I digress…)

So, yes, I realize there was much more to Curry’s career than this one role. Personally, I liked him in The Shout (1978) and I liked him even more as The Lord of Darkness in Legend (1985). And of course he did well in other roles besides. But Dr. Frankenfurter must have been a hard act to follow, even for him!

Yes, rest in peace, by all means. Joy you gave, in abundance, to mortals and earthlings here below.