We can’t think of Tim Curry and not think of his teeth …
Tim Curry was beautiful.
Beautiful in mode and manner, interpretation and expression, he cut an artistic legacy through gender and generations, stage and screen. Beautiful in theatrical fearlessness, he brought counter-culture, pop culture, vaudeville and pantomime to screaming union through a sensual encounter nobody ever dreamed of.
Hypnotic. Controlled. Intimate. Threatening.
Horror. Comedy. Timing.
He was vampy, campy, and villainous – all wrapped in Nappa lambskin and oily purrs. Every one distinctive; whether of character flesh or fantasy. Animation or artistic transformation carried Curry imagination that never failed to shove the artist himself aside, to be memorably forgotten.
There were parts Tim Curry played that you didn’t realise until later were him. For forty-three years his complexity of simplicity mapped almost 250 movies, 35 theatre productions and more than 150 recordings in voice-overs, audio books and games. In 1989 he’d read the script of Silence of the Lambs, desperately wanted the role of Hannibal and his agent couldn’t even get him in the room.
For an actor, disappointment like that is just a jump to the left of anger; a psychology and physiology slick and familiar to Tim Curry. A childhood spent navigating the explosive and emotional disorder of his mother had to have an upside.
Particularly when the last words to ever land on you from your RN Navy chaplain dad were, “Look after your mother” and you’re 12 years old.
His grin, like no other, tells the story every time. Just a beat ahead, and then a step to the right. Across his face strutted his mouth in a dance of seven velvet veils to carnival sounds and burlesque.
This is why we can’t think of Tim Curry and not think of his teeth. The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter was never a dentist, but a sinister medical parody of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, complete with lab and slab, but with added camp fab.
His real ones, his fake ones; doesn’t matter. The mesmerising mastication of Tim Curry chewing the scenery required teeth, and he had them. He considered his face “extravagant”. Which would have sounded when he said it like a string of black pearls unsheathed and uncradled from the silks of a bespoke presentation case.
More than 40 years of professionally working teeth worked a voice and a face with that distinctive, layered journey of Curry flavour that lingers long after its arrival.
His self-described “great big gob” with “too many teeth – headlamps, really” had rubbery, wry character. Pre-dental veneers, they were the rakish detail to arched brow and slow grin; cadence singularly sibilant, syllabic or sybilic and often all at once. With a naturally, unnervingly wide smile, even without prosthetics, his teeth were cabaret, comic or chilling menace.
And perfectly sized for his larger-than-life accents and character-essence annunciation. The complementary imperfections delivered a favourite to us all. A dream that urges you to be it; your worst dream come true, and everything you were ever afraid of. It was coded as early as 1975, in ways music, arts and culture journalist Michael Dwyer “couldn’t quite access and plenty dark too.”
A contradiction in personality was mirrored in his face. Small of features but for huge eyes and mouth; his teeth a standing start to the renowned characters he eventually built. As a cult icon, Berlin painter and sculptor Jessine Hein re-created Tim Curry’s original teeth by hand with denture acrylic, plaster and paint. Just as she had David Bowie’s in 2015.
Somewhere in the time warp from the London ensemble of Hair, Frank-N-Furter and Annie, his evident malocclusion, prominent incisors and asymmetrical arch were ditched, with dental work of crowns and porcelain veneers.
Homeware, essentially.
Workwear brought the custom fangs of the Lord of Darkness in Legend, the separately stained and gnarly gnashers of Ma, Pa and Winona Brackett in Tales of the Crypt, and almost two decades later the rotted, yellowed teeth of Criminal Minds’ nomadic serial killer Billy Flynn.
Just a warm-up for the 1990 miniseries, It.
The demonic, dancing clown Pennywise, lightbulb head an anchor for horseshoe hair: a captured flame of fairground fun and matchless malevolence. The facade of the monster shapeshifting made-to-order terror. The eternal cosmic force of evil, manifest. Changing reality at will to the dark and unpredictable. Tenderness strictly confined to the meat of children – extreme vulnerability so easily relatable in these decades of AI and techno-immorality.
Two different dental prosthetics carried part of Curry’s Pennywise persona. One prominent and unevenly spaced, like a rabbit gone wrong. Goofy enough to hide intention and tempt trust; the other needle-like and uneven. The grin of another world.
Hee-haw, hee-haw, hee-haw.
In his 2025 biography Vagabond, the actor explained his delectable predilection for miscreant roles. “To play a villian well,” he wrote, “demands that you dig into dark, weird, fantastical nooks of your own mind; the tabernacles that everyday polite society would rather you not explore. I appreciate that villains are often characters that threaten to sweep you off your feet. Bad guys are sexy. And if I look dashing in the costume, forgive me. I just can’t help myself.”
An “austere architecture of teeth” was likely never overtly part of the Rocky Horror script. This subtlety suggests the teeth seem not merely long or prominent, but part of an alien, sculptural aesthetic, something an adolescent observer finds fascinating precisely because it doesn’t conform to ordinary ideas of masculine beauty.
Teeth are increasingly a cinematic requirement, depending on the shade the director might want:
austere teeth — severe, beautiful, controlled
funereal teeth — deathly, Gothic
vampiric teeth — explicitly supernatural
predatory teeth — animalistic, threatening
ivory teeth — beautiful, classical
severe teeth — stark and unsettling
elegantly sinister teeth — theatrical horror
an austere smile — maybe even more natural than “austere teeth”
From faux horror Frank-N-Furter, through the theatrical muppety black-heart of Long John Silver to the psycho horror of Pennywise, you were beautiful, Tim Curry. Just beautiful.
