Do the Time Warp With 7 Fun Facts About Tim Curry For His 79th Birthday

Dan Clarendon April 19, 10:48 am

English actor and singer Tim Curry, UK, 23rd January 1974. — Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

To paraphrase The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’s astounding how time is fleeting — and how star Tim Curry is turning 79 years old today, April 19.

The actor is best known for playing Rocky Horror’s Frank-N-Furter on stage and screen, but he has also turned heads with his roles in Broadway’s Amadeus and Spamalot, in cinema’s Clue and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, TV’s It miniseries, and at least one viral video game part, described below. Read on for fun facts about this fan-favorite thespian.

1 Princess Diana was a fan of his

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961 - 1997) sitting on a step at her home, Highgrove House, in Doughton, Gloucestershire, 18th July 1986

Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images

In a 2005 interview on Fresh Air, Curry said that Princess Diana was such a Rocky Horror fan that she requested to meet him in Vienna in 1986 after she saw a theater production of his.

“Diana said, ‘You were in The Rocky Horror Show,’” Curry recalled. “And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I was, but I’m sure that you haven’t seen it.’ She said, ‘Oh, yes. … It quite completed my education.’ She was a very funny girl and a very beautiful one, and a very wicked smile came with that sentence. She was great fun.”

2 He endured a legendary makeup process for Legend

For his role as the demonic Lord of Darkness in the 1985 fantasy film Legend, Curry was subjected to an eight-hour makeup routine — at first, anyway. Luckily for him, the prosthetic team eventually got the process down to five hours.

“Enclosing Curry’s body totally in makeup meant that he had to be more than patient in getting it off,” director Ridley Scott told Cinefantastique in 1985. “He had to sit in a bath for an hour to liquefy the soluble spirit gum. Unfortunately, he got impatient and claustrophobic and too hurriedly pulled it off, which meant he tore his skin off as well. We had to shoot around him for a week to calm him down.”

3 He almost played the Joker — twice

BATMAN, Jack Nicholson, 1989, (c) Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection

Curry was in the running to play the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film, as were Willem Dafoe, James Woods, and John Lithgow, according to Screen Rant, but the job went to Jack Nicholson.

A few years later, Curry had another near-miss with the iconic part when he was the first pick to voice the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. “I did play Joker for a while, but I had bronchitis, and they fired me and hired Mark Hamill,” he told ScreenGeek in 2017. “That’s life.”

4 He reportedly neared two villainous Disney roles

Curry was also considered for the voice of Jafar in the 1992 Disney film Aladdin, according to IMDb trivia about the film. Ultimately, it was Jonathan Freeman who voiced the evil vizier, though Curry did voice three characters in the animated Aladdin TV show.

And for Disney’s 1994 pictureThe Lion King, producers “seriously considered” Curry for the part of dastardly lion Scar but ended up going with Jeremy Irons because of Irons’ classical theater training, according to Disney Voice Actors: A Biographical Dictionary.

5 He has gone viral for his line reading in Red Alert 3

Curry played Premier Anatoly Cherdenko in the video game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and his Russian-inflected reading of one of the character’s cut-scene lines — “I’m escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism… space!” — has become a meme, as Vice reported in 2022.

“Curry was probably mugging more than the rest of them were, but even so he just delivered it with conviction,” Haris Orkin, the cinematic writer who penned the line, told Vice. “He seemed to believe what he was saying, as stupid as it was.”

6 He’s an avid gardener

The book Great Private Gardens of the World showcased the garden Curry cultivated outside his Spanish colonial-style villa in the Hollywood Hills. “The idea is organizing nature not just into pleasing shapes, but also as a kind of spiritual resource,” he said in the book, per The Guardian.

And Colin Farrell got to benefit from Curry’s green thumb, telling Architectural Design in 2014 that his “magazine-worthy” garden was Curry’s handiwork. “Tim Curry is a purveyor of properties,” Farrell explained. “He inhabits a house for two years and does a lot of restructuring work, and my house was one of those. Tim lived there for two years. The back garden is really beautiful. He did an amazing job.”

7 He’s telling his life story in a new memoir

Amazon

On October 7, 2025, Grand Central Publishing will release Vagabond, a 256-page memoir in which Curry recounts his youth, his rise to fame, his stage and screen career, and his recovery from his 2012 stroke.

“I’ve had the time of my life revisiting my favorite memories over the past couple of years, and I’m shivering with anticipation to share them with you this fall,” Curry told People this month.