On Tim Curry & disability

On Tim Curry & disability

“I don’t know if it was Parkinson’s that he had or a different neurological condition […] and I was really delighted to see […] some of the interviews with him and coverage of him in the last couple of years, while, you know, people have realized that he was perhaps at the end of his life.

The way that his career had been reassessed while he was still alive, and that he’d received that praise and that adoration, and also had got to show that that really acerbic wit still remained. And, you know, of course, I think probably everyone listening to this knows that we don’t portray disabled and chronically ill people in a particularly interesting light in general.

We tend to belittle and patronize them and see them as diminished in every way. And I thought it was glorious that Tim Curry shed any shame that he might have felt about being in a very different condition to the way that he was at his heyday, the way that we were perhaps used to seeing him, and was, and felt able to show up anyway and still make everybody laugh, and just enthrall us with his anecdotes and his kind of slightly catty comments…”

-Katherine May, from The Clearing podcast

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