How ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ discovered Tim Curry
It’s a role that you can’t imagine anyone else in. Dr Frank-N-Furter simply has his face, his voice, and his pizzaz. Obviously, I know how acting works, I’m aware that’s because it was Tim Curry beneath the makeup, but the point I’m making is that the role was made for Curry like an acting chicken-egg paradox. Added to this notion is the huge amount of happenstance that led him there.
Prior to the Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975, Curry’s screen career was mostly orientated around voice-over work. He landed himself a role in the stage show of Hair, but as is often the case in musicals, he found himself swallowed up in a huge cast and a hell of a lot of hair and makeup. Thus, even when he met the writer, Richard O’Brien, who would also go on to write the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it was merely as one of many in a rotating ensemble.
Nevertheless, the mystic figures of fate had seemingly already cast him as the perfect fit for the singing-dancing Transylvanian transvestite doctor in his new flick. So, as it happens, when Curry was in his local gym one day, blowing off some steam, he simply looked over and saw O’Brien in need of a hand. He jumped off the treadmill and wandered over.
The two got talking. Curry saw the booming potential in O’Brien’s new script, and O’Brien saw that Curry was the perfect fit for Dr Frank-N-Furter. Had their paths never crossed in the gym that day, then who knows who would’ve scored the role, and who knows what would’ve happened to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Fate would even form the character once Curry secured the role. At first, he intended to play Dr Frank-N-Furter with an exaggerated German accent. But while he was on the bus thinking this over, his ear was twisted by a woman speaking in a voice so posh he thought Queen Elizabeth II was sitting behind him.
This faux pomposity then began to formulate in his mind and in order to hone the character, he studied his own mother’s exaggerated phone voice. His “pretty hip” mother eventually went to see the film and loved it. However, she didn’t like it quite as much as when he was in Pirates of Penzance because the actual Queen Elizabeth II was in the audience watching that. And that just about completes our strange, and thankful circle of fate.
