Remembering Tim Curry

Tim Curry, the British actor who died Tuesday at age 80, was best known for playing the flamboyant extraterrestrial mad scientist Frank-N-Furter in the original stage and film versions of The Rocky Horror Show in the 1970s. But as he explained to Terry Gross in a 2005 interview on Fresh Air, that iconic role was something he never saw coming. "I thought I'd be in a white lab coat," he said of his original expectations for the part.

The Accidental Birth of an Icon

Curry described getting the role in Rocky Horror almost by accident. He was working at a tiny 60-seat theater in London when the next show coming in was a new musical called The Rocky Horror Show. "It just started in this tiny theatre, you know, and it just took off like a sort of rocket," he recalled. The character's now-legendary look—the corset, fishnet stockings, and garter belt—was a late development. "I had no idea it was going to be like that," Curry admitted. The costume came from a designer named Sue Blaine, who had previously worked with Curry at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre on a production of Jean Genet's The Maids. "We bought the corset for three pounds off a barrow in the market in Glasgow and wore it back to front," he said. For Curry, the key to playing Frank-N-Furter was never to think of it as drag. "It's just what people wear in Transylvania," he explained. "It's truck driver drag. It'