A thought on the line between actor and audience, and other things about Tim Curry

“It’s an odd pairing. I’ve always loved the audience, but from a distance. Once you’ve elicited a strong response from an audience, you want it again. That kind of an energy is as addictive as any narcotic.”
— Tim Curry

These words come from Tim Curry’s memoir Vagabond, which was released last year. I came across these words Monday while listening to Curry narrate it.

It appears in a section about the time when his career seemed to have jet fuel, thanks to his breakthrough role as Frank N. Furter in the Rocky Horror Show and then then movie adaptation. Curry reveals that he felt could draw the energy from the floorboards during a performance — and yet also wanted to keep his distance from the audience once the lights went down.

Curry was not one for publicity, and when he describes how he avoids not only interviews but is cautious about interactions with fans and audience members, I wonder if he has come across as aloof.

The book is good. I finished it early this morning. Curry had a life-changing stroke in 2012, and has needed a wheelchair since. While his body has been affected, his mind is still intact, and that is clearly evident in the book, and in his performance of the audiobook.

Tim Curry has had many remarkable performances, and while most of us know him from his film career, his heart belongs on the stage. When Rocky Horror was turning into a thing in London, he was told to avoid being typecast as Frank. While it wasn’t like there were too many other roles like that that could come along anyway, he did make a deliberate point of campaigning for characters in stage productions that were very different indeed. These includes Mozart in Amadeus, the original staging of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, King Arthur in Spamalot and many others.

In the movies, he’s often been a delight, and I’ve enjoyed him most when he lets loose and chews up a bit of scenery.

There’s also this Tumblr-inspired meme, which gets to the heart of why Michael Caine and Curry each work so well in Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island, respectively.

“The reason Michael Caine and Tim Curry are so good in their respective Muppet movies,” the meme says, “is that Michael Caine treats the Muppets as fellow actors, and Tim Curry treats himself as a fellow Muppet.”

Yes, bingo. Exactly.

Except that Curry does not agree with that at all. He dismisses the theme of the meme out of hand. Oh well!

Like Caine, he says he connected with the Muppets as distinct performers, and had to remember there was a human right by their costar.

Younger folks may not remember that Curry also had designs on a career as a rock star. It didn’t really happen, and his memoir sheds some light on this part of his career. His first recordings were for a failed project overseen at first by Lou Adler, who monied up for Rocky Horror and later took on Curry as a singer. Curry admits he was not helpful to the production by wanting to be a bit of everything. Eventually, Curry landed at A&M and made three albums before his contract expired and they moved on … and so, really, did he.

I Do The Rock was the closest Curry came to having a hit single, which is to say, it wasn’t a hit, but this name-dropping bit of late Seventies pop culture did at least chart. (I bought the album!)

Stimulating, as the song goes.

I enjoyed hearing Tim Curry tell his story. It’s so unfortunate a stroke cut short his ability to perform at his fullest, but his memoir is an achievement in its own right.

Meanwhile, I’ve been building a playlist in Spotify of songs mentioned here on the blog.