As I said yesterday, it was a bit of a grim week on a lot of fronts, one of which was the celebrity death front. And although I finished this on Monday so it’s technically cheating, it feels somehow right to make Tim Curry’s memoir this week’s pick.
In case you missed the last fifty years of pop culture, Tim Curry was an actor who first rose to prominence as Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Show in a role he reprised in the movie version The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He went on to play an eclectic range of characters across his career – and if you’re a millennial he will likely have been a key figure in one of the movies or TV shows that defined your childhood – whether it is Muppet Treasure Island, Home Alone 2, Annie, The Wild Thornberries, The Worst Witch or Clue. And there are more I could have picked – he was that prolific. He had a stroke in 2012 but continued to do some voice work and occasional appearances after that.
Vagabond came out last autumn and was much awaited as Curry didn’t give a lot of interviews (although he was always great value when he did) and rarely revealed anything about his personal life. And if you’re looking for juicy scoops on that front, this is not that. He warns you right at the start he’s not talking about his love life and he sticks to that. What this is is a gallop through the rest of his life with a look at his early years it feels mostly because he thinks it helps you understand his attitude to life: his father was a navy chaplain whose job meant they moved around a lot and then died young (in his late 40s from a stroke), quite a distant relationship with his mother who didn’t understand him and a boarding school education all of which added up to a very self contained and independent adult. He does a really good job of making you feel like he’s revealing a lot about himself while actually keeping a lot back – basically a memoir on his own terms, which he sets out very clearly at the start.
I am one of those who first saw him in one of those 80s and 90s roles and then graduated to Rocky Horror as a teen and then missed out on seeing him as King Arthur in Spamalot because I was a penniless student at the wrong end of the country at the time. So I learned a lot about his career from reading the book but what I enjoyed the most about it was how much it felt like it was really in his voice. And I know I said that he didn’t give a lot of interviews, but the ones he did were memorable and of course he’s done so much voice work over the years that it is easy to imagine him saying the words as you read it – and he did read the audiobook and I can’t tell you the willpower it took not to also buy the audiobook when I had the hardback on the pile.
I’m glad that he got to tell his story on his terms – even if he wasn’t entirely sure about the whole concept as he said several times through the book. I’m annoyed at myself for the fact that it took him dying for me to bump the book to the top of the to-read pile but strangely it did feel like a good time to read it and having read all the obituaries and watched all the clips this week it was nice to read about his life in his own words – and spot where quotes had been lifted for the obits or stories that he had told in interviews popped up or were lightly referenced. But I enjoyed reading it and it’s out in paperback now and if I was running a bookshop I’d be putting it in an obvious place for people to happen across right now.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 