Tim Curry’s cause of death revealed

Tim Curry, known for some of cinema’s most iconic roles including Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, died at age 80 on August 25.

The official cause of his death has been revealed as coronary artery disease, according to Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s documents.

According to the documents, a history of stroke and kidney cancer were also listed as other significant conditions that contributed to his death.

No surgery was performed for Curry’s coronary artery disease, kidney cancer or history of stroke, according to the outlet.

Curry died at home in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, with his long-time manager and friend Marcia Hurwitz confirming the news.

Inside his history of health issues

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Curry suffered a major stroke in 2012 while receiving a massage. At the time the massage therapist immediately called emergency services after noticing something wasn’t right.

Doctors found two blood clots on Curry’s brain and he had to undergo emergency surgery.

Following the stroke, Curry used a wheelchair as he continued to face mobility issues in his left arm and leg.

The stroke caused issues with his short-term memory, and after the invasive brain surgery he had to learn how to talk again.

Curry, who was also known for his role playing the smug concierge in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, spoke openly about death in one of his final interviews.

“I don’t fear death,” Curry told CBS Sunday Morning in October 2025.

“I try to avoid it, as I think we all do. But, I suspect that in the end, I will welcome it.”

When asked what he meant by that, Curry laughed, explaining: “Well, I think it may be very comforting to go bye-bye – and I want to earn it.”

For Curry, he said he wanted to “earn the privilege of not being here” although he was not “galloping towards it”.

When asked whether death would provide him with relief, the actor said, “I think I will embrace it.”

An iconic career

Known for his arch humour, a putty-like face and gift with voices, Curry earned three Tony nominations – for Spamalot, My Favourite Year and Amadeus – and an Emmy nod in 1994.

“I like playing the more curious corners of the human mind and human behaviour, partly because they’re a tad more interesting,” Curry told The Associated Press in 1993.

Curry burst onto the scene as the Transylvanian Frank-N-Furter in the sci-fi, cross-dressing rock musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which premiered in 1973 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went with it to Broadway and then starred in the 1975 cult-classic movie alongside Barry Bostwick, Meat Loaf and Susan Sarandon.

The show was ahead of its time in terms of its representation of LGBTQ+ characters and has entered the pop culture lexicon for its many iconic and memorable scenes, including the song The Time Warp, which has been covered by handfuls of artists, and the often-quoted phrase, “Dammit, Janet!” The show was twice revived on Broadway, most recently in 2026 with Luke Evans playing Frank-N-Furter.

Tim Curry’s take on Frank-N-Furter

Curry’s Frank-N-Furter had a posh British accent, but that almost wasn’t the case. He said he tried German and American accents but pivoted after he heard a British woman on a bus talking with her friend.

“I met a woman on a bus who said, ‘Do you have a house in town or a house in the country’ and I thought, ‘That’s the voice!’” he told LA Magazine in 2015.

Curry’s Broadway career included starring in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties in 1975-76, playing Mozart opposite Ian McKellen’s Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” and King Arthur in the 2005 production of Spamalot. The New York Times said his “stalwart, plummy-voiced Arthur wears a smile as inflexible as armor.”

His screen credits included starring as the child-killing monster in the 1990 miniseries version of Stephen King’s horror novel It and the double-dealing Cardinal Richelieu in 1993’s The Three Musketeers with Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen and Chris O’Donnell.

In his 2025 memoir, Vagabond, Curry warned readers that while there were scraps of his nature in his characters, he was none of them.

“The distinctions between who I really am and who I’ve pretended to be as an actor have proven to be a source of great disappointment to some audiences. It has not caused me much personal distress beyond the periodic necessity to deter stalkers,” he wrote.

Tim Curry’s life and career began in England

Born in Cheshire, England, Curry was the son of a Navy chaplain and a school secretary. He was 12 when his father died and his mother subsequently went to work. Young Tim learned to cook his own breakfast, resulting in a lifelong passion for cooking, and sharpened his humour muscles.

“My father was a Methodist chaplain in the Navy, and we moved pretty much every 18 months,” he said.

“So I had to make my mark in new schools and new playgrounds pretty quickly. And a sense of humour is the best way to do that. I was always a kind of mimic, one of those awful, relentless children, I should think.”

Acting did not occur to him until his middle teens, when he attended a school for the sons of Methodist ministers.

“I was lucky that it was a liberal kind of school; many of them in England are rather Dickensian,” he recalled to the AP.

“There was a lot of theatre, and I sang, too; I had been singing in church from the age of 7. I had enormous opportunities to express myself in that way. I just got hooked, really.”

His training continued in 1965 when he entered the University of Birmingham, at that time one of three English universities with a drama department.

“I took an academic course, which I largely ignored, I’m afraid, and just acted all the time,” he said.

He then went down to London and talked his way into his first job, Hair, in the West End. Curry went on to the more formalised theatre of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, where he was enlisted for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Tim Curry’s other roles

He went on to futilely try to stop Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister from taking advantage of New York’s swanky Plaza Hotel in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Curry also was Wadsworth, the unhinged butler with a secret past, in the also quotable Clue. He played a wealthy philanthropist in 1995’s Congo and opposite Carol Burnett in the movie Annie.

“Hollywood tends to use European actors, especially English ones, as villains because they prefer heroes to be Americans. I think we come with a certain amount of style, which is hard for American actors to acquire,” he told the AP in 1997.

“They have to choose early on between New York and the theatre vs. Hollywood and television and movies. In England there is still regional theatre, where you can be assured work for several years doing all kinds of things.”

In later years, Curry lent his baritone voice to many voice-acting roles in children’s TV series, including Star Wars: The Clone Wars, The Wild Thornberrys and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius.

After a yearslong break from live-action roles, he played a plague doctor-masked man in a wheelchair in 2024’s Stream, something the film’s director Michael Leavy called a dream come true.

Curry, who never married and had no children, was deeply private about his personal life. But he wrote in his memoir that he was convinced to tell his story thanks to so many moving encounters with fans.

“The notion that my experiences might resonate helps me persevere – if they strike a chord with only one teenager, alone with a book in his room, as I so often was; or that young woman reading this on an interminably long bus ride; or that older queen, hopefully still in his fishnets, who saw Rocky Horror upstairs at the Royal Court; or that middle-aged mother who organises Clue watching parties and refuses entry to anybody out of costume; or that buttoned-up bank clerk who relishes musicals; or that woman who kicked me out of the Waverly for being myself,” he wrote.