As a Storyteller, Tim Curry Had the Gift

Last year was kind of my year of Tim Curry.Not because I knew him — I didn’t — but because we did three interviews.

The first was in February, by phone, for a piece marking the 50th anniversary of the original Broadway production of “The Rocky Horror Show.” That musical was his Broadway debut, in 1975, and its thudding failure with critics and at the box office still nettled him.In September, we met for lunch in Hollywood to talk about his memoir, “Vagabond,” which came out that fall.And then, in November, we spoke again just after the playwright Tom Stoppard had died.

They went way back, on the stage and screen, and it seemed obvious that Curry would have an insightful remembrance.(This turned out to be true: “It’s so extraordinary that English was his second language,” he said of Stoppard.

“Because nobody advanced it more or cherished it more.”)Over the phone, Curry observed that Stoppard as a playwright had remained a kind of journalist, which he once had been.“That’s interesting,” I said, meaning it, and Curry’s response took me by surprise — dry and slightly defiant, but with an eggshell crack of vulnerability to it.“I hope so,” he said, “because I don’t want to be the idiot child in whatever it is you’re writing about him.”No danger of that — or as I told him by way of reassurance, “Have you met you?” Curry, who died on Tuesday at the age of 80, was ferociously smart.

Along with being extraordinarily funny, it’s part of what made him such a superlative storyteller — an ability he kept after the stroke in 2012 that paralyzed his left side, slowed the cadence of his speech and largely ended his acting career.His memoir is proof that those chops endured.That was in evidence during our lunch, too, when he slipped smoothly into his grandmother’s Scottish accent as he told an anecdote about her, or mimicked me after something I said inadvertently made him laugh.We are having trouble retrieving the articl...