Tim Curry, 'Rocky Horror Picture Show' Icon, Dead at 80

Tim Curry, the British actor whose portrayal of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show' became a landmark of transgressive performance, died Tuesday at the age of eighty. What began in 1975 as a commercial misfire quietly became one of cinema's most enduring cultural institutions — a midnight ritual, a community, a permission slip for the unconventional — and Curry's magnetic, gender-defying performance was the force at its center. His death closes a chapter on a kind of artistic courage that arrived before the culture was ready for it, and helped make the culture ready.