Tim Curry was 29 when he put on the corset, heels, and makeup of an extraterrestrial scientist who seduced a newlywed couple regardless of their gender.
It was 1974, at the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, and among the audience were Jack Nicholson, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger.
A year later, that same creature arrived on the big screen in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, a film that is now the longest continuously running theatrical release in history and that caused a scandal at the time by depicting fluid, ambiguous, label-free sexual desire in the midst of mainstream cinema.
Curry later said that Jagger wanted to take the role and that the director rejected him.
Curry looked back without guilt: “It was part of the sexual revolution, really. The experiment was in the air and it was palpable. I gave them permission to be who they discovered they wanted to be”, he told the Los Angeles Times.
Half a century later, he was still proud to have been that uncomfortable body no one knew how to classify.