Tim Curry's Devilish Charm Was Irresistible

Tim Curry has died at 80, and the peculiar thing about his career is how much of it he spent playing evil while being, unmistakably, the most likable presence on screen.

The role that should have been a trap

He originated Dr. Frank-N-Furter on stage and carried the character into "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," a performance that has now outlived several generations of midnight audiences and shows no sign of stopping.

By every rule of the industry that should have finished him. A young actor delivers one overwhelming, unrepeatable character and spends the next forty years being asked to do it again at conventions. Curry simply walked out of it, which required both talent and a certain stubbornness about what he would agree to be.

A run of villains that ate their own films

What he walked into was a sequence of antagonists that ought to be taught as a cautionary tale for directors. He was the Lord of Darkness in Ridley Scott's "Legend" in 1985, opposite Tom Cruise and Mia Sara, buried under makeup and prosthetics that took roughly five and a half hours to apply each morning and about an hour to remove each night.

Almost nobody remembers the plot of "Legend." Everybody remembers the horns. That is a fairly complete summary of what Curry did to the films he appeared in — he was not stealing scenes so much as quietly relocating the center of gravity toward wherever he was standing.

Then in 1990 he played Pennywise in ABC's miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's "It," and permanently rearranged the childhoods of everyone who caught it on broadcast television. The performance works because he declined the obvious choice. He did not play the clown as a monster wearing a disguise, with the menace leaking through. He played him as genuinely, warmly funny, which is considerably worse.

The weapon was always the amusement

That is the thread running through all of it. Frank-N-Furter is charming. Darkness is seductive. Pennywise is delightful for whole minutes at a time. Curry's villains do not threaten you from across the room; they invite you over, and the audience goes, every time, knowing exactly what is going to happen.

He suffered a major stroke in 2012 that required brain surgery and left him with serious mobility limitations. He kept working — voice roles, appearances, eventually a memoir titled "Vagabond." The voice, which was always the actual instrument, never went anywhere.

Neither, by all accounts, did the amusement. Fifty years of playing people who enjoy themselves enormously while doing terrible things, performed by someone who appears to have enjoyed himself enormously while doing none of them.