Tim Curry was a shapeshifter. Notoriously media shy, he let his fans delight in his wild array of acting roles without really ever knowing him at all. When his more persistent admirers formed an emotional bond with the Tim Curry of their imaginations, he would sometimes be forced to set them straight. ‘I’m just a person’, he would say, ‘and I’m not your person’.

One of the joys of watching Curry on screen was that he was often unrecognisable from one role to the next. I have a childhood memory of the moment I learned that the demon in Legend (1985), the villain in Annie (1982), the butler in Clue (1985) and the cross-dressing alien scientist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were all played by the same man. It was quite the revelation.

Curry died this week aged 80. The publication last year of his memoir, Vagabond, gave fans a tantalising glimpse of the real man, but even there he was determined to retain an air of mystery. Those who were hoping for salacious anecdotes about his love life were disappointed, because, as he rightly pointed out, ‘specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are – respectfully – none of your fucking business’.

His vagabond status was well earned. As the child of a military father, he was forever on the move, and it is easy to see how these early experiences shaped his capacity to embody such a range of characters. His first accolade came early when he was awarded the prize for the ‘Most Beautiful Baby in Hong Kong’. His family relocated roughly every 18 months for the first 11 years of his life, meaning that he was continually exposed to new people and environments.

Little wonder that Curry saw mutability as the essence of his vocation. As he put it: ‘How can you trust somebody, or truly know somebody, who appears as a king one day and a jester the next? What does it mean when neither role is the true identity of the person, and when that very person might be gone the next day?’ In this, he might have been paraphrasing William Hazlitt’s essay on actors, in which he described them as ‘today kings, tomorrow beggars’ and wrote that ‘it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing’.

Curry’s key philosophy in life struck him during a gap year of travelling across Europe and north-west Africa with his schoolfriend, Richard Cork (later the art critic for The Times). Drunk on brandy one night in Marrakesh, the two friends made a pact to thoroughly explore all their contradictions and ‘see them through to their conclusion’. It proved to be Curry’s guiding principle throughout his life and career.

As he explained in his memoir: ‘Professionally, the lure of pursuing contradictions has drawn me toward complex characters or compelled me to make them more complex and nuanced: so, for example, a scoundrel who is also charming, or somebody rather abhorrent whom I can also play out as being quite irresistible. Those are the roles that have enticed me the most.’

Few roles better embodied this combination of the abhorrent and the irresistible than Dr Frank-N-Furter in the West End musical, The Rocky Horror Show. This anarchic rock’n’roll homage to science fiction and horror B-movies enjoyed an immediate success when it opened on 19 June 1973 at the small venue upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, on a night that was suitably stormy and lightning-streaked. When adapted into a film in 1975, Frank-N-Furter was his breakthrough role. In spite of the movie’s initial failure at the box office, its subsequent cult status has ensured his legacy.

When I interviewed the show’s creator, Richard O’Brien, in 2013, he described Curry’s portrayal of Frank-N-Furter as ‘definitive’. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how his performance in the movie version, with its delirious energy and lip-smacking abandon, could possibly be bettered. As O’Brien told me: ‘We had one actor 20 or 30 years ago who said to me: “I hope you know, Richard, I’m stealing everything off Tim Curry.” And I thought that was an honest way to approach it.’

Curry later gave the very best advice on how to approach the role. ‘None of the characters in the show are in drag’, he said. ‘We’re all wearing what people normally wear in Transylvania.’ Most importantly, Frank doesn’t ‘camp around’ or pretend to be a woman. ‘He is a very strong, aggressive man… In other words, if you’re going to attempt to truly enter the character, wear your high heels like a man.’

To make his feature-film debut in such an extreme part carried risks of future typecasting, yet the astonishing variety of roles that followed proves that he successfully manoeuvred his way through that minefield. He played Mozart in the Broadway production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1980-1981) and was nominated for a Tony Award. Other Tony nominations were to follow for his performances as Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl (1987-1988) and as King Arthur in Spamalot (2004-2007). It was quite the leap from such theatrical turns to his famous on-screen villains – Pennywise the Clown in the miniseries It (1990) and Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers (1993) – but he made it seem effortless.

Even in these most diabolical of guises, Curry insisted that he was able to draw on his own life experience. Of Pennywise and Richelieu, he acknowledged that his ‘terrifying childhood memories’ of his mother – who possibly suffered from an undiagnosed form of bipolar disorder – informed his approach. And might it even be the case that he was thinking of his mother during his brutal axe murder of Meat Loaf’s Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show? ‘Well, between us, yes’, he confessed in his memoir. ‘Yes, perhaps I was.’

Those who tried to pigeonhole Curry were attempting the impossible; shapeshifters are not so easily categorised. It seems appropriate that one so protean and elusive was, at an early screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, mistaken for an imposter. A cinema manager tried to have him ejected for impersonating Tim Curry.

In his essay on actors, Hazlitt quotes Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ This could serve as a fitting maxim for any actor, for whom even the most traumatic experiences can provide material for the craft. The body of work Curry leaves behind is testament to how successfully he wove his many disguises from the mingled yarn of his own extraordinary life.

Suicide is pernicious. It is a tragedy that passes unbearable grief to loved ones forevermore. The unanswered questions torment those left behind because no one is ever truly sure what happened. We need to know what happened – it allows us to make sense of things. But suicide withholds this.

In many ways, suicide passes the pain on to other people. One suicide begets more suicides. It’s an extremely contagious event. Perhaps because it offers a false escape hatch for people who are in mental pain, when one person takes it, the idea is somehow vindicated and others follow.

None of this is new. We have known for centuries that suicide can be contagious. After Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, reports emerged of young men imitating his suicidal hero. It became known as the Werther effect.

The removal of the shame and secrecy that once surrounded suicide was welcome. But it created another problem: how do you talk openly and compassionately about suicide without encouraging contagion?

That is why, back in 1989, suicidologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, public-health officials and journalists gathered in the United States to establish recommendations to reduce suicide contagion. Their conclusions were explicit. They warned against glorifying people who died by suicide and against presenting suicide as a means of accomplishing an end. They also cautioned against public eulogies and memorials that might give vulnerable people the impression that society was honouring the suicide, rather than mourning the death.

For these reasons, the vigil for Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square last week should never have taken place. Stand Up To Racism organised this vigil in order to remember Arday and, presumably, to highlight the dangers of racism. But in doing so, it risked encouraging copycat suicides.

Thousands of people gathered beneath Nelson’s Column for the Arday vigil. There were flowers, speeches and placards reading ‘Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday’. Speakers presented Arday not simply as a man whose death was desperately sad, but as a victim and even a martyr. A villain was identified – Nathan Cofnas, one of the researchers who drew attention to Arday’s plagiarism – and he was booed by the crowd.

The irresponsibility of this is almost impossible to overstate. People who are suicidal fantasise about exactly this kind of overblown romanticisation of how they will be mourned, appreciated and valorised after death. They imagine everyone crying their eyes out at their funeral.

We all do this a little. Most of us know what it’s like to indulge ourselves with the idea that one day our very worst enemies will be publicly forced into regretting their harsh words to us. We daydream that one day we will be understood as heroes to everyone we know. This fantasy should never have been staged in Trafalgar Square.

In 1994, five years after the release of the media guidelines on suicide, Kurt Cobain killed himself. There were enormous fears about what would happen. Cobain was almost the perfect candidate for romanticisation – young, beautiful, troubled, world-famous and an icon of alienated youth.

Yet the response was remarkably restrained. Researchers subsequently found that the expected rise in suicides did not occur, although calls to crisis lines increased substantially, especially in Seattle, where he died. It is believed that the unusually responsible media and public-health response may have helped. The response deliberately worked against making his suicide heroic.

Twenty years later, when Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014, the media environment had changed. Social media had ridden roughshod over the old media guidelines. Researchers subsequently found 1,841 more suicides in the United States between August and December 2014 than their statistical model predicted, an increase of almost 10 per cent. We cannot say that Williams’s death caused those deaths. But the association is precisely why suicide researchers take contagion so seriously.

Arday’s treatment was not unique. Others have come through similar public maulings. James Frey endured an onslaught after parts of his supposedly autobiographical A Million Little Pieces were exposed as invented. Rachel Dolezal and Belle Gibson became international objects of ridicule when their fabrications came to light. More recently, The Salt Path controversy had many of us glued to our screens as another inspirational life story was ripped apart.

Arday’s story had all the ingredients of an irresistible scandal. The combination of the silly season, Arday’s good looks and his outlandish claims, coupled with the nerdy intensity of Cofnas – with his controversial views and mad-scientist vibe – made the story impossible to ignore.

The response to Arday’s death was depressingly predictable. The academics went to war against the journalists. The journalists retaliated and turned on academia. The right blamed DEI while the left blamed the right.

Arday was in the middle of it all. But in choosing suicide, he left behind grieving friends, a family and two fatherless children. We cannot know what happened in his final moments. Whatever Cambridge University did to fulfil its duty of care, it wasn’t enough to save his life. Yet people choose suicide for a whole raft of reasons – typically, many different issues have converged. It is therefore not only dangerous but also inaccurate to reduce his death to a simple morality tale in which journalists criticised him and he died as a consequence.

Jason Arday is dead. What should have brought sobriety instead brought a vigil. For a person already experiencing suicidal ideation and in a state of high emotion, what exactly is the message here?

If the saddest story in the world unfolds tomorrow and another famous figure dies by suicide, we should mourn him, grieve him and talk about his life. Talk about the complexity of suicide. Talk, above all, about the possibility of surviving unbearable distress. But we should never turn his suicide into his apotheosis. We should never give suicidal people reason to believe that death is the moment when the world will finally love them.

Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist. She is also the director and founder of Genspect.

Gone are the days when the Green Party of England and Wales was full of hippie tree-huggers singing ‘Kumbaya’ around a campfire. Today, the party is unrecognisable – and far more sinister. It has been intolerant of dissent in its own ranks for a few years. Now, it is turning that intolerance against the media.

The recent death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday has provided Green Party leader Zack Polanski with his latest pretext for going after the media. Speaking last week, he blamed Arday’s seeming suicide on the media’s reporting of Arday’s plagiarism, academic fraud and rampant fabulism. He called on the government to ‘ensure a responsible [media]’, by holding an inquiry into its ‘culture and behaviour’.

This came just days after he’d made a similar demand in response to some newspapers’ refusal to toe the ‘climate emergency’ line in their coverage of the heatwave. ‘It’s time we sorted out the press’, Polanski posted on X. ‘Constant misinformation to protect their donors and fossil fuels is destroying lives and our planet. The government must step up and stop being cowardly.’

If you think the talk of ‘sorting out’ and changing the ‘culture and behaviour’ of the press sounds ominous, that is because it is. It is also deeply authoritarian.

In the comments to his X post, Polanski posted two links that he encouraged his followers to sign. The first was a petition to parliament calling for a ban on foreign media ownership, the establishment of a social media levy and restrictive regulation. The second link directed followers to Hacked Off’s website, and a petition demanding that the government launch an inquiry into the British press.

Polanski has since doubled down on these comments. He has claimed that ‘freedom of the press should never have been freedom to own and dominate the press’. He has insisted that the UK regulate its media ‘now’. He is particularly obsessed with a ‘tiny number of billionaire firms’, which Polanski seems to believe control the media like a sinister cartel.

It should surprise nobody, in fact, that behind that gap-toothed grin, Polanski does not like the media much at all. And that’s because he doesn’t like to be challenged or scrutinised. After all, columnists have ridiculed him for his claim, made over a decade ago, that he could enlarge the size of a woman’s breasts through hypnotherapy. Reporters also exposed the fact that he failed to pay council tax on his houseboat, and that he dishonestly claimed to have worked as a spokesperson for the Red Cross.

It’s not just the thin-skinned Polanski who wants to muzzle the press. It seems to be a widely held desire throughout the Green Party. Last week, the Spectator revealed that 89 members had endorsed a motion, submitted ahead of the party’s Autumn conference, with the title: ‘Justice for Jason Arday: Stopping Racist Smear Campaigns and Reforming Media Power.’

This censorial motion calls for two state regulators to ‘map and address racism’ and ‘ableism’ in the media. It also wants a regulator to have the power to clamp down on ‘harassment’, which is the term Green supporters have used for press scrutiny.

The Greens’ ultimate aim would be to force every major national newspaper to join a state press regulator. And the already overpowered media regulator, Ofcom, would be given powers to force large social-media platforms to remove ‘hateful, discriminatory and conspiratorial’ material, seemingly even where it falls within the bounds of lawful speech.

Recently, we witnessed just how menacing Green Party supporters can be. Writing in the Spectator earlier this month, Jonathan Sacerdoti revealed an attempt by activists to have him silenced by the police. After a disagreement with a canvasser who visited his home in April, Sacerdoti was told that an allegation of ‘harassment’ had been made against him. Conceding that there was no evidence for the complaint, the police eventually closed the investigation. But it was another telling insight into how these people operate.

The current militancy of the Greens has been a few years in the making. In 2022, Shahrar Ali was sacked as the party’s policing and justice spokesperson – and later expelled from the party – for expressing his gender-critical beliefs. This censorial trend has accelerated under Polanski.

The Green Party is no longer a benign force in British politics. It seems to have jettisoned its old environmental concerns to pursue a string of culture-war issues, championing trans rights (at the expense of women) and demonising Israel. And now it’s coming after press freedom.

The Greens have now shown their true, authoritarian colours.

‘When I was young, I had no sense, I bought a flute for 50 pence / The only song that I could play was fuck the Pope and the IRA.’

So went the chant that emerged from the away section following Chelsea’s Monday night clash with Fulham FC at Craven Cottage. The impromptu chorus of ‘Flute for 50 Pence’, an infamous sectarian football song that was historically deployed by sections of Rangers FC supporters, appears to have sent Chelsea officials into a nervous tailspin.

‘We would like to strongly remind all supporters that the club does not condone any chants which discriminate against a protected characteristic’, read the email sent out to Chelsea’s fanbase earlier this week. ‘Any supporter found guilty of this will face the strongest possible action, which could include indefinite suspension from attending all Chelsea matches and ejection from the stadium.’

The public-service announcement concluded by emphasising the club’s commitment to ensuring ‘a welcoming matchday experience for all’, and asked supporters ‘to take collective responsibility and remain vigilant in helping us tackle discriminatory chanting’.

Crackdowns on football chants are nothing new. Chelsea, like many Premier League clubs, currently has extraordinarily broad conditions on prohibited chants. It reserves the right to sanction supporters for any language of an ‘offensive, immoral, obscene, abusive, indecent, political or discriminatory nature’, with the framework stating discriminatory language can attract a 36-month ban. Indeed, over the past few years, the list of ditties that might lose you a season ticket has been growing. But there’s something especially silly about this latest addition – not least because ‘Flute for 50 Pence’ takes aim at a public religious figure and a terrorist organisation. However vulgar, indecent or ugly the historical sentiment, the idea that fans should be ousted for singing it shows just how institutionally micromanaged the nation’s favourite sport has become.

English football has been in this censorial quagmire for a while now. What began with the Football (Offences) Act 1991, which criminalised ‘racialist’ and ‘indecent’ chanting at designated matches, has expanded into an ever-growing regime of policing what supporters say and sing. More recently, the CPS has taken a hard line against so-called tragedy chanting: references to Hillsborough, the Munich air crash and other football-related disasters, even in jest, can lead to prosecution under public-order legislation. While nobody wants football grounds to become arenas for racism, intimidation or threats, somewhere along the way, the principle that fans should not be subjected to abuse has become entangled with a rather different one: that fans should never be allowed to say anything that could conceivably wind someone up.

For better or worse, football was once one of the few places in British public life where people were permitted to be spectacularly obnoxious. The terraces were partisan, profane and deliberately antagonistic. Nobody pretended otherwise – and no one with a brain mistook a football chant for a peer-reviewed contribution to public discourse. The modern game, by contrast, increasingly treats supporters as the nasty, rough edge of English football that safeguarding departments can’t sand away fast enough. It is yet another example of a proletarian pastime being neutered for the comfortable enjoyment of the middle classes.

There is a world of difference between protecting supporters from threats and intimidation and protecting them from words they find objectionable. The world will keep turning if football culture stays a little unruly. As a Catholic, I’m unlikely to join in with a chant that effs and jeffs about the pontiff. Then again – who am I to cancel the Rent Boys’ fun?

Georgina Mumford is a London-based writer.