The Brief

In 2018, a company began quietly buying up some $900 million worth of land from farmers in Solano County, California, an area just north of the Bay Area. As the parcel ballooned to more than 60,000 acres, their motivations remained a mystery — stoking unease and speculation. Then, last year, the news broke: The land was to become a brand-new eco-friendly city, backed by a roster of Silicon Valley billionaires, and built from the top-down by a company called California Forever.

The plan was launched by Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader and California Forever’s CEO. He said the project has three main goals: “Help solve the California housing crisis”; create a walkable metropolitan area with a high quality of life and low carbon footprint; and build a new “economic engine” for Solano County. “There’s no playbook here,” Sramek said. “What we are trying to do is really, really different.”

Before California Forever could break ground, their proposal, the East Solano Plan, needed approval from the people who already live in Solano County. Where Sramek envisioned growth, however, others warned of irreversible ecological damage. Despite launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to persuade the public to vote for the proposal in the upcoming November election, concerns continued to grow as elected officials began speaking out in opposition, and a coalition against the project formed. Local mistrust was further deepened by the company’s ongoing lawsuit against landowners who resisted their offers. In April, a poll showed that 70 percent of Solano’s voters would likely reject the measure.

On July 22, the day before the Solano County Board of Supervisors was set to decide whether to put the initiative on the November ballot, Sramek and the board agreed to retract the proposal. According to a joint statement announcing the decision, Sramek said that California Forever will try to get it on the ballot again in two years, after a report assessing the environmental impacts of the project is finished.

Other similarly minded and deep-pocketed projects have been springing up around the world. Masdar, a $20 billion planned zero-carbon city in the United Arab Emirates, has been delayed for decades and scaled back beyond recognition. Neom, the futuristic $500 billion renewable energy dream of Saudi Arabian royals, now anticipates less than a fifth of the 1.5 million residents they originally planned on. Malaysia’s Forest City, which won design awards for sustainability, has been called a ghost town. And the billionaire behind Diapers.com has big plans for Telosa somewhere in the deserts of the American West, a sprawling green energy metropolis.

These projects all seek to fulfill urban dreams of a better, environmentally friendly life by building a city from scratch. But even when the buildings exist, they fail to draw residents and, despite plans that emphasize sustainability, projects struggle to win the support of environmentalists. California Forever hopes to eventually house 400,000 people — goals comparable to those of Masdar or Neom.

“I have not seen one of this size which has been successful so far,” said Alain Bertaud, an urban planning researcher at the Marron Institute, part of New York University. “But that doesn’t mean that they will not be — there are so many in the pipeline now.”

Though Bertaud said he’s normally skeptical of proposals for these new cities, he thought California Forever’s plans looked well designed. One aspect that could help the project find success is its proximity to other Bay Area cities, he said, as the lure of the region’s job market might encourage people to move there.

But when it comes to the project’s environmental promises, he’s unconvinced — if only because it’s difficult to measure benchmarks, like carbon emissions, until a project is up and running. “I don’t doubt the dedication of people who are fighting for sustainability,” he said, “but unless you define it in a very clear way, I’m afraid that ‘sustainability’ is a self-satisfying slogan to put on whatever idea you have.”

The question of sustainability is at the heart of California Forever’s ambition and problems alike. Both backers and skeptics want to tackle the area’s housing crisis. Eye-popping rents and home prices far exceed national averages, with single-family homes going for a median price of $1.4 million. It’s one reason why the region has the third-highest homeless population behind New York City and Los Angeles.

Instead of solving these problems with a new city, California Forever’s critics would like to see more housing built in the seven cities that already exist in Solano County. “Building housing in existing communities is one of our best climate solutions, and paving over 17,000 acres of non-irrigated farmland is not,” said Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at the Greenbelt Alliance. The nonprofit, along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the California Sierra Club, is one of the 16 groups in Solano Together, the coalition that opposes the project.

Wilson says that the development threatens both the area’s potential for storing carbon in the soil and local biodiversity, and also risks leading to more pollution from people driving to work in nearby cities. And although California Forever holds water rights that could support the first 40,000 residents, Solano Together says that these don’t accurately reflect water availability. Securing a reliable supply, they argue, would be challenging in a region so prone to drought.

By starting from scratch, however, California Forever says their plans could avoid the baggage of urban problems like car-centric design and gas utilities, making it easier to support dense housing and run on renewable power. “Our plan will be the lowest per capita carbon emissions anywhere on the planet. It’s going to be pretty transformational,” said Bronson Johnson, the company’s head of infrastructure and sustainability, who added that he’s spent years grappling with barriers to retrofit existing cities. “I think when we look at the greater good of this project, that far outweighs local impacts,” Johnson said.

But the voters need convincing. After The New York Times named many of the investors behind the project — including Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn cofounder, and Michael Moritz, a prominent venture capitalist — in August 2023, California Forever began working to bring residents over to their side in time for the 2024 election. By May, the company had spent some $2 million on its campaign and gathered enough signatures to qualify their initiative for the ballot.

Cows graze on a parcel of land near Rio Vista located in Solano County.

(

Justin Sullivan

/

Getty Images

)

In weeks leading up to the Solano County board meeting in July, an economic report by the business-backed Bay Area Council touted the potential jobs and housing benefits, saying that the county could increase employment in high-earning sectors by 53 percent. Meanwhile, the company proposed putting a lagoon right in the middle of the new town, “open to everyone from Solano County.”

Five days before the meeting, the county released its own assessment that said the initiative lacked details on key issues, such as infrastructure funding, traffic impacts, and water supply. Many of these unknowns would be clarified by an environmental impact report required under California law, which the company had said it planned to conduct after residents voted. According to county officials, it was this omission, and the lack of a binding development agreement, that ultimately tanked the proposal.

“This politicized the entire project, made it difficult for us and our staff to work with them, and forced everyone in our community to take sides,” said Mitch Mashburn, chair of the Solano County Board of Supervisors, in the statement announcing that the plan would be put on hold. According to the statement, Sramek and Mashburn came to the decision together after agreeing that the timing of the proposal had become unrealistic.

“I want to acknowledge that many Solano residents are excited about Mr. Sramek’s optimism about a California that builds again. He is also right that we cannot solve our jobs, housing, and energy challenges if every project takes a decade or more to break ground,” Mashburn said in the statement.

Solano Together heralded the news as a win. Wilson said that even though an environmental impact report would clear up many of the coalition’s questions, especially around water supply, the location of the development still poses what she considers an intractable environmental problem. “It is a vibrant landscape that supports our food systems, our environment, our water systems,” she said.
Sarah Moser, an urban geography researcher at the University of McGill in Montreal, said it makes sense that sparsely populated agricultural lands and deserts are appealing for mega developments like the proposed East Solano Plan because they’ll encounter less opposition. But by building on undeveloped land, “by definition, you’re going to incur a carbon debt that you may never be able to pay off,” she said.

Although Moser thinks it’s logistically possible to build a city from scratch, she says that such projects are increasingly high risk, with unattainable goals. “You can make affordable housing, or you can make money, but you can’t do both,” Moser said, adding that California Forever’s for-profit model fits into a broader pattern of “rich people getting richer” in the urban mega developments she has studied.

And perhaps the most important ingredient necessary to successfully build a new city is the very thing that stands in the way: people.

The promise of a city built on ideals isn’t enough to fill it with people, Bertaud said. There has to be an existing community of people, culture, entertainment, and jobs that draw people there. It’s a chicken-or-egg problem unique to starting from scratch. “Why would you go to a city where there is nobody?” he said.

When A.W.’s husband lost his job, she was thankful the safety net preserved the family’s access to healthcare. Her eldest son had a team of doctors and therapists at Stanford’s specialty gender clinic; losing that support team, she said, would have been traumatic. The clinic accepted Medi-Cal patients.

Now, California is racing to keep children like A.W.’s son from losing access to gender-affirming care after the federal government moved to cut off funding for those services. State lawmakers are scrambling to approve emergency funding in the last days of the legislative session, even as LGBTQ advocates and parents argue California had months to prepare for the change — and may still fail to prevent a gap in care.

This month the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finalized a rule prohibiting federal reimbursement for gender-affirming care for minors. It takes effect Oct. 13. Roughly 1,500 transgender and gender-nonconforming children on Medi-Cal could lose access to puberty blockers, hormones and related care if the state doesn’t act.

Lawmakers want an emergency $10 million to replace the lost federal funds. The money would buy time for the state to create a separate funding pathway for transgender kids that complies with federal rules, though the Department of Health Care Services says that could take up to a year.

A funding pathway would keep state dollars separate from federal dollars, and allow Medi-Cal children to keep receiving care without disruption. Without it, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth could lose access to ongoing medical treatments.

“They’re low-income Californians who need support arguably the most, and Medi-Cal is their lifeline to access that care,” said Assemblymember Chris Ward, a Democrat from San Diego and chair of the LGBTQ caucus, which is fighting for the money. “We need to stand up for them.”

But some LGBTQ organizations and parents, including A.W., doubt California’s Medi-Cal agency can stand-up a separate program for transgender kids in under six weeks. They also say they feel misled by state leaders after months of budget negotiations.

For the past eight months, advocates and medical organizations had warned California’s Medi-Cal agency that the federal government intended to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors. They believed state leaders had set aside money to prepare for that outcome during June budget negotiations, but later learned officials did not follow through.

“I thought that when we took our kids to Sacramento to meet with members of the Assembly and Senate that we were advocating for a backfill that would cover kids on Medi-Cal who would lose those federal dollars,” A.W. said. “I’m really disappointed that our coalition spent so much time and effort on something that I’m not sure we’ll reap the benefits of, and that sucks.”

CalMatters is identifying A.W. by initials only to protect the identity of her two children, both of whom are transgender.

Why California wasn’t ready

In December, the Trump administration published preliminary rules targeting payments for gender-affirming services for young people.

Though the rules weren’t finalized until August, advocacy groups spent months with state officials negotiating for a program that would protect transgender children on Medi-Cal, according to budget letters and presentations obtained by CalMatters. They wanted the state to set aside $1 million to create a separate Medi-Cal funding pathway and to use other money to bolster access to care.

Many believed the state had done exactly that in June, when the budget included two pots of money totalling $56 million for gender-affirming services and reproductive healthcare. After the budget passed, advocates learned health and budget officials for Gov. Gavin Newsom had removed language that would have ensured some of the money would be used to create a separate, state-only Medi-Cal funding program for transgender children.

The Department of Health Care Services, which administers Medi-Cal, did not answer questions about why the money wasn’t earmarked for Medi-Cal and whether there would be any gap in services for transgender children. It referred CalMatters to the Department of Finance. A finance department spokesperson said the administration was “aware of this particular issue” but had no updates to share.

Ward said the budget, which addressed California’s fourth consecutive deficit, didn’t have “a nickel to spare,” and because federal rules hadn’t been finalized at the time, the Medi-Cal funding commitment wasn’t locked in.

On social media, the California Department of Health and Human Services pointed to the $56 in the budget, saying it remains “committed to ensuring all people have access to the medically necessary, evidence-based care that will allow them not only to survive, but thrive.”

Arne Johnson, an organizer with Rainbow Families Action, called that statement misleading. “In the end, not a penny of it is going to backfill Medi-Cal at all,” Johnson said.

The money will instead fund infrastructure investments for transgender health clinics as more care gets pushed out of hospitals and into primary care settings under federal threats, and will aid other groups that have lost federal funding, including military families and veterans, according to two sources familiar with budget negotiations.

Many advocacy groups said California’s long-term investment is welcome, but argue the state failed to protect the immediate care of vulnerable children.

“It’s been very frustrating to see California say in many words that it’s supportive of trans people, and be so unprepared for something we all knew was about to happen,” Johnson said.

Laura Sheckler, budget and policy director at the California Primary Care Association, which represents clinics, said the state will have a challenging time creating a program by the time the federal cuts are expected to begin.

“The bigger question is how is California going to ensure that whatever they set up is going to be available on Oct. 13 when these rules go into effect?” Sheckler said.

For one family, Medi-Cal was the safety net

A.W. and her family are bracing for that deadline and what they anticipate will be an inevitable loss of care.

Discovering that her first child was transgender prompted a personal reckoning for A.W. She had spent most of her career working in conservative politics for prominent Republican leaders. At home, though, her first child showed signs of gender dysphoria even as a toddler, pulling bows out of his hair, crying when forced to wear a dress and asking why he couldn’t stand up to pee.

A.W. and her husband chalked it up to tomboy behavior.

“We had zero education or inkling that he might be trans, but as we started educating ourselves and learning more, we realized that he at a very, very young age was verbally communicating with us who he is,” A.W. said.

After the family moved from Virginia to the Bay Area for work, her son, who was 8 at the time, started seeing a therapist. A year and a half later he received his first puberty blocker, and has continued to see therapists and endocrinologists at Stanford ever since. Medi-Cal allowed her son to keep seeing the same doctors when the startup where A.W.'s husband worked went under two years ago.

“I say that (my son) has really opened me up and made me see things and accept things that I didn’t understand,” A.W. said. “For me, it was a huge transformation.”

Just last year, A.W.’s second child also came out as transgender. It was surprising, but both parents say part of parenting is loving their children unconditionally.

Either child losing healthcare — even temporarily — would be devastating, but for her eldest, now 15 and giving himself testosterone injections weekly, the consequences could be permanent.

“A gap in care for my son is a terrible thing. He doesn’t take testosterone and what happens? He would be forced to medically detransition,” A.W. said. “It’s unacceptable that the state wasn’t prepared.”

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A federal judge in Boston has handed the Trump administration another temporary win in the legal fight over the president's executive order to restrict mail-in voting for the midterm election.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani on Wednesday canceled a nationwide ruling she had issued that blocked the U.S. Postal Service from working on Trump's directives.

The decision sets up another possible consideration of the executive order by the Supreme Court. The court ruled on a procedural issue, but has not weighed in on whether Trump's order is legal.

In that earlier procedural ruling, the Supreme Court halted a similar June ruling from Talwani that applied only to the 23 mainly Democratic-led states, plus Washington, D.C., that sued over the order.

In response to the executive order Trump signed in March, USPS released a final rule for federal ballot mail. It lays out new design requirements for mail-in ballot envelopes, as well as a plan for delivering mail-in ballots only to people on lists of absentee voters that states would have to turn over to the mailing agency.

It remains unclear, however, if and how Trump's directives would ultimately affect voting by mail for the midterms, which is set to start in a matter of weeks.

Trump's order is expected to face more legal hurdles as this lawsuit and other related cases filed by Democrats, voting rights groups and two dozen mainly Democratic-led states proceed.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey
Copyright 2026 NPR

With only six days left in the legislative session, lawmakers refuse to back several of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s controversial proposals for reducing how much for-profit utility companies must pay after causing a wildfire.

Assembly and Senate lawmakers oppose the governor’s proposals to limit survivors’ compensation for pain and suffering, curb reimbursements to insurance companies for massive payouts to homeowners when power lines spark a fire and limit how much local governments can recoup for incinerated infrastructure, according to legislative sources and internal memos obtained by CalMatters.

Those are among the most contentious parts of a high-stakes package of wildfire policies Newsom has been negotiating behind closed doors at the end of his final legislative session as governor.

Neither the governor’s office nor leaders in the Senate and Assembly have released the text of the proposals they are negotiating, setting the stage for them to potentially push through a complex package of policies with little public hearing in the final days of the session that ends Aug. 31.

Newsom’s office has not responded to inquiries about lawmakers’ opposition to parts of his proposal. If they can’t reach an agreement by Friday, the legislative deadline to publish bills before they get a vote, they would punt the issue of rising utility liabilities to the next governor.

At a press conference last week, Newsom said he’s open to amending his proposal but insisted some reforms must be made.

“I feel very strongly that we need to move on this,” he said.

Newsom is concerned, his staff says, with ensuring fire victims’ damage claims get paid faster while freeing utilities from other lawsuits that could shake investors’ confidence in the companies’ financial standing and lead to higher power bills for customers. But opponents, including local governments, wildfire survivors, consumer advocates and insurance companies, argue the plan helps utilities escape accountability.

Though any changes they make would apply only to future wildfires, the negotiations have stoked the anger of a group of Eaton Fire survivors who traveled to Sacramento this week to protest the proposals. Earlier this month, state and Los Angeles fire officials found investor-owned utility Southern California Edison responsible for the January 2025 fire, which ignited under a decades-old decommissioned Edison transmission tower. The blaze claimed 19 lives and destroyed 9,400 structures.

“My job is not to ensure that we’re increasing profits for shareholders for these companies,” Sen. Sasha Renee Perez, a Democrat who represents Altadena, said at a rally with the group on Tuesday. “And we certainly, as a Legislature, are not going to negotiate with companies that want to act like terrorists.”

Lawmakers diverge

Perez was referring to a report that executives of Pacific Gas & Electric and Edison have told Wall Street analysts the companies plan to take unspecified actions to protect their shareholders if lawmakers do not pass laws this year helping them reduce their financial responsibility after fires.

Newsom and Democratic lawmakers agree on a proposal that would curb utility CEO bonuses after a destructive fire and increase fines for utilities with safety violations. Sources familiar with the negotiations said a Senate proposal would go further, targeting utility profits by directing regulators to scrutinize company spending and to consider limiting rate increases in line with inflation.

Lawmakers also agree with Newsom on improving community wildfire mitigation projects and using future insurance taxes to pay for home hardening. And they generally agree on limiting fees for attorneys who represent victims and other plaintiffs in suing utilities for damages after a fire, though the Senate plan would also curb fees for the utilities’ attorneys.

But neither Senate nor Assembly leaders agree with Newsom on eliminating subrogation — the right of insurance companies to recoup their costs for claims from utilities or other corporations responsible for a fire — according to memos of the Assembly’s counterproposals and Senate sources familiar with the negotiations.

The insurance industry has been vocal about the possible effects, arguing it would increase insurers’ costs and lead them to raise their rates.

 ‘A massive new strain’

Sen. Ben Allen, a candidate for insurance commissioner and Democrat whose district includes the Pacific Palisades, which also experienced a deadly fire last January, said killing subrogation to try to address one problem (high electricity rates) could create another problem (even higher insurance rates).

“I fear we will create a massive new strain on the insurance system that could break basic questions of affordability for Californians,” Allen told CalMatters. It could also exacerbate problems in the state’s already challenging insurance market, he said.

Lawmakers are aligned with the governor on limiting the number of middlemen who are entitled to benefit or profit after a disaster, or at least capping how much they can get. Lawmakers in both chambers want to bar insurers from selling their claims and subrogation rights to hedge funds. The Senate plan would still allow it if insurers get approval from the insurance commissioner, which smaller insurers might seek if they need cash quickly to pay claims after a fire.

Assembly leaders also are pushing back on Newsom’s proposal to reduce the amount local governments can recover from utilities after a wildfire by limiting claims to the depreciated value of burned infrastructure, rather than the full cost of rebuilding it. The proposal had sparked outrage from the California State Association of Counties, the League of California Cities and groups representing school districts.

Under pressure from the powerful California Professional Firefighters union, Newsom appears to be backing away from that effort.

On Monday, the union wrote Newsom a letter supporting his overall package and thanking him for “adjustments to ensure that local governments are not unduly impacted by this proposal.” Newsom spokesperson Anthony Martinez did not respond to an inquiry about that proposal.

A fraught proposal

Newsom’s office, lawmakers and the utilities (via their Wildfire Victims First campaign, which includes few fire victims) say their motivation is ensuring fire survivors’ damages are prioritized over other plaintiffs. That means determining which survivors are most deserving, which is among the most emotional and fraught of Newsom’s proposals.

The governor would limit survivors’ damages for pain and suffering to those who lost a family member or suffered an injury. Other survivors would only get to make a non-economic damages claim if they were in the burn perimeter and had to flee, with a cap of $150,000 per person to avoid overdrawing from the state’s wildfire fund, which is paid for by utility customers and shareholders.

Gayle Nicholls Ali, an Eaton Fire survivor, protests outside the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento on Aug. 24, 2026.

(

Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

/

CalMatters

)

In response to survivors’ objections, the Assembly’s proposal would expand eligibility for those non-economic damages without caps, while the Senate plan would not limit eligibility and instead raise the legal bar for survivors outside the perimeter to prove the fire caused their trauma.

But a month of protests by Eaton Fire survivors opposing Newsom’s plan shows choosing how to prioritize victims remains complicated. Their group, Every Fire Survivors Network, objects to anything seeking to differentiate among fire victims.

“We are the real wildfire survivors,” a few dozen of them chanted outside the governor’s mansion Monday night, where Newsom was hosting state lawmakers for an end-of-session reception.

Gayle Nicholls-Ali’s house in Altadena burned down, and she is starting to rebuild. Her son’s home, around the corner, was not destroyed but has smoke damage. He and his wife have been living in a donated RV on the property, waiting for his insurance company to approve his claims so they can begin repairs.

Under Newsom’s proposal, she’s not sure whether her son would qualify for non-economic damages because he is a survivor who evacuated but was not physically hurt and did not lose his home.

“The mental stress alone” has been immense, she said. A retired public school teacher, Nicholls-Ali and her husband have lived in Altadena for more than 30 years, and it was her son’s dream to buy a home in the same city.

“He wanted to live near home,” she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Tim Curry, a character actor who created a gallery of delicious, very loony villains for stage and screen, including Dr. Frank-N-Furter in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," has died. He was 80.

Curry, who suffered a stroke in 2012 that put him in a wheelchair, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles, according to his longtime manager and friend Marcia Hurwitz. No cause was disclosed.

Known for his arch humor, a putty-like face and gift with voices, Curry earned three Tony nominations — for “Spamalot,” “My Favorite Year” and “Amadeus” — and an Emmy nod in 1994.

“I like playing the more curious corners of the human mind and human behavior, 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 a handful 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.

For many years after the film’s premiere, the British-born actor declined to discuss it. He didn’t participate in activities promoting the film, which morphed into an interactive event at midnight shows. But he later warmed again to the project and embraced it at public events. Asked by LA Magazine how he viewed “Rocky Horror,” he responded: “With a sort of bemused tolerance. It’s neither a blessing nor a curse. I was lucky to get it.”

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 humor 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 humor 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 theater, 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 formalized theater 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, as the smug concierge, 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 also 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 theater vs. Hollywood and television and movies. In England there is still regional theater, 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 organizes ‘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.