The Brief

Hugs, high-fives and handmade signs welcomed students and their families back to Pasadena's Don Benito Elementary School on Wednesday.

“You feel the love,” said parent Ravea Miller. “It's always been love. But you just feel it more [today] because everybody was affected.”

The majority of Pasadena schools that shut down during the peak of the Eaton Fire have now reopened. Pasadena Unified staggered reopenings over two weeks, and the final nine campuses welcomed students back Thursday.

Unanswered questions remain about rebuilding, how to make up for three weeks of lost in-person schooling and how the fallout from the fires could exacerbate existing financial challenges.

There’s also relief.

“We're just excited, ready to get back and get the kids back into school, and get them back into the groove again, and make things go back halfway normal,” said Gilbert Moore as he walked his kids into Washington Elementary STEM Magnet School on Monday morning.

Taking stock of feelings

Some students grappled with mixed emotions.

“I'm happy that I didn't get affected by the fires, but I'm sad because other people got affected by the fires,” said fifth-grader Jezzebelle Hernandez.

The district estimates that more than two-thirds of its 14,000 students and 1,387 employees live in evacuation zones.

“We don't know if they're going to come in smiling or they're going to come in crying,” said Cherise Holmes, a wellness coach at Washington.

Dulce Bernabe said her second-grade daughter was worried about her school and her friends during the closures.

“Creo que les sirve mucho estar aquí,” Bernabe said as she walked out of the school. She thinks its helpful for the students to be in class because it shows them that this is their reality. "Tenemos que seguir viviendo con lo que haya pasado.” We have to continue living with what's happened, she said.

A ‘warm and inviting’ return to school

According to district data, an average of 82% of students showed up on the first day of class at the first 11 schools to reopen, and at most schools, attendance has increased in subsequent days.

Don Benito first-grade teacher Amethyst Juknavorian invited her students to wear their pajamas and bring their favorite stuffed animal to the first day of class in more than two weeks.

“We never start like that; we always start with our instruction,” Juknavorian said. “But, for this week, I want it to be just more warm and inviting.”

Don Benito Elementary School first-grade teacher Amethyst Juknavorian, right, welcomes students with a pajama day on Wednesday.

(

Mariana Dale

/

LAist

)

The students sat in a circle with their stuffed animals in their laps and one by one (and sometimes all at once) shared their feelings and experiences.

They ranged from fear to boredom. A boy in blue plaid pajama bottoms recounted how a tree fell in his apartment courtyard and he saw a dead squirrel — which prompted his peers to shout out dead animals that they’ve seen.

“That does happen,” Juknavorian said.

Abel Hernandez wore a navy blue onesie with a candy cane pattern and held a fuzzy plush longhorn cow. He said he felt sad and nervous.

“The wildfire almost hit my house,” Hernandez said.

LAist spoke with two education researchers who said it’s not the lost time in the classroom that has the greatest potential to negatively affect students, but the stress and trauma of being evacuated, losing a home, or witnessing others in the community go through those experiences.

 ”It's important for educators to provide opportunities for young people to read, talk about [and] make sense of their experiences during the fires,” said UCLA education professor John Rogers. “Because we want young people to come away from this really difficult time feeling a sense of their personal power, as well as how they're connected to others who care about them and about their future.”

USC education, psychology and neuroscience professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang said young children process disturbing, distressing and frightening experiences throughout a lifetime.

“They are woven into the story of how the world can work and how the world does work and what it means to be safe, what it means to live in a home, what it means to have a school and friends and adults around you who care about you,” Immordino-Yang said.

Fifth-grader Jezzebelle Hernandez and first-grader Abel Hernanandez attend Don Benito Elementary, which reopened on Wednesday. "The mountain looked beautiful, but now it's not," Abel said, referring to the scorched slopes in the distance.

(

Mariana Dale

/

LAist

)

Gilbert Moore walks his children, Patrick, left, and Daisy, right to Washington STEM Magnet Elementary. Moore, who is also a custodian in the district, said crews worked days, nights and weekends to clean up the schools.

(

Mariana Dale

/

LAist

)

The Los Angeles County Office of Education and other organizations have deployed dozens of additional mental health staff to Pasadena schools since they reopened.

Juknavorian said she’s already requested support for one child who experienced some anxiety on the first day back, but was “pleasantly surprised” that her students were largely excited to return.

“Children are very resilient,” Juknavorian said. “They just have a gift of just living life and being so full of hope.”

She said in her more than 20 years of teaching, she’s watched students rebound from the loss of parents, divorce and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They can see all, all the destruction and the homes gone, but they're going to smile again,” Juknavorian said. “They're going to move forward because that's what we do.”

Post-wildfire clean-up

Pasadena Unified has said in statements that more than 1,500 workers joined existing maintenance staff to clean schools, remove more than 159 tons of debris and the top layer of sand from playgrounds.

Wildfires can release chemicals from plastics, lead, asbestos and other toxic substances. The smoke and ash makes the air dangerous to breathe, particularly for children and pregnant people.

Several of the parents who accompanied their students on the first day back followed them into the classroom.

“Other than the worried faces on some of the parents, everything’s looked good,” Henry Ortega said after dropping his daughter off at Washington Elementary STEM Magnet on Monday.

“I drive by a lot and I've seen them working day and night,” Ortega said. “So I know they did a good job.”

After cleaning, the district tested the surfaces inside schools for soot, char and ash and published the results online.

“Every result that's come back has been positive and that our schools are safe places to be,” said Pasadena Schools Supt. Elizabeth Blanco.

California does not mandate specific cleaning or testing before schools located near wildfires can reopen, nor does it require ongoing monitoring.

Though recent rain has tamped down the ash, as it dries and debris clean-up continues, toxic materials can become airborne again.

Blanco said the district will monitor air quality and keep children indoors and restrict outdoor activity as needed.

District staff said they are communicating with the Army Corp of Engineers about debris removal and are looking into installing additional air sensors.

“We’re hearing you, we want you to feel safe returning to schools,” Blanco said after listening to parents and families give hours of public comment at a board meeting Thursday and question the district's reopening plan. "We're responsible for all of your safety ... without the regulations to help us.”

Students return, but questions remain

Each of Pasadena Unified's 14,000 students now have the option to attend school in person, but there are still a lot of unknowns.

To start: The fire destroyed or otherwise forced the relocation of six campuses, including Eliot Arts Magnet Academy, Altadena Arts Magnet Elementary, three independent charter schools and Franklin Elementary, which closed in 2020. The district has also moved several early education programs.

“We had to fit many pieces into this puzzle,” said Chief Business Officer Saman Bravo-Karimi. “We had to figure out what was best overall under very difficult circumstances.”

Bravo-Karimi noted the offers include less space than schools had before and that the district is building additional portable classrooms.

Pasadena voters approved a $900 million facilities bond and $5 million parcel tax in November to fund repairs at existing campuses, mental health support and educator wages. The district’s board of education has resolved to rebuild Eliot, though no details about cost or timeline exist yet.

Charter school leaders have not yet accepted the district’s offer to lease space at three other campuses, according to a presentation at Thursday’s board meeting.

“We created a plan to make sure they had a place within the PUSD where they could return to school at the same time we were returning to school,” Blanco said.

Odyssey South parent Veronica Jauriqui said she doesn't feel comfortable sending her son to the proposed relocation site because of its proximity to the wildfire burn zone. Several other parents have raised similar concerns.

 "We've lost our neighborhood,” Jauriqui said. “We don't want him to lose his friends and his school.”

The region’s schools are no stranger to historic upheaval. White families fled Pasadena schools following a 1970 desegregation order.

There are also the financial questions. Like other Los Angeles-area districts, Pasadena Unified enrollment has declined in recent years— 19% in the last decade.

So far, the district has counted 862 families who lost homes in the fire, and it’s unclear how many may be permanently displaced.

The district reports 90 students have unenrolled since the start of the fires. Fewer students means less funding, because California funds public schools based on an average of how many students show up each day.

Learning recovery will be another long-term issue. Results from national standardized tests show students in California — and throughout the nation — have not made up reading and math skills lost during the pandemic.

District Chief Academic Officer Helen Chan Hill said students had access to online learning materials during the closures and the district's focus on social and emotional learning as school reopened was informed by other schools that have experienced disasters.

“You have to ensure that basic needs are being met so that academics can really flourish when the time is right,” Hill said.

Blanco said the district was already working to address learning loss through summer programs.

“ We were working on that prior to COVID and making sure that students were learning grade-level content as well as making up skills that they need,” Blanco said.

The district has not announced any academic recovery programs specific to the wildfires.

UCLA’s Rogers suggested that instead of adding additional days to the calendar, schools consider how to create opportunities for students to collaborate on creative work over spring break and during the summer.

“ I think it's by taking action and showing that you can do things together with others that young people will feel a greater sense of belonging and will feel more whole in the process,” Rogers 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.