A prolific performer across stage, screen and TV, the actor starred in Legend, Clue and It, but will always be associated with the flamboyantly camp rock’n’roll musical in which he made his breakthrough

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Tim Curry, the versatile performer of screen and stage, who made his name as the flamboyant Dr Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show, has died aged 80. Reports say Curry died at his home in Los Angeles.

The actor’s manager confirmed to Variety that he died peacefully. No cause of death is known as yet.

The Room Next Door star on overnight success, ‘sneaky follows’ from politicians and how internet commenting has dragged society down

How did you get into comedy?
I was submitting sketches to Spitting Image when I was 17 and making my own sketches pre-internet. But I guess in terms of my actual break, that didn’t happen until [online political sketch series] The Room Next Door.

Was that an overnight success?
I was watching a particularly bad interview with Boris Johnson and jotted down the concept of an adviser next door who was pulling his hair out over what was being said. I then filmed it after dinner, posted it before I went to bed and the next morning it was in the millions. So that is literally an overnight success, isn’t it?

From Watership Down and Fatal Attraction to Bambi and Python’s Holy Grail, rabbits are an unlikely constant in film – and often with sinister intentions. Here are the 20 best leporine movie moments

The mighty Alan Bleasdale wrote this razor-sharp farce set on New Year’s Eve in Liverpool, where rival Catholic and Protestant militants have accidentally booked the same venue. One of the acts going horribly wrong is Elvis Costello as a stage musician who says: “I’m a bit worried about me rabbit.” With reason, as it turns out.

An affectionate biography of the polymath includes details of never-produced gems such as Monty Python’s Third World War

Terry Jones was a Python, a historian, a bestselling children’s author and a very naughty boy. He loved to play women in drag, started a magazine about countryside ecology (Vole), founded his own real-ale brewery and was even once a columnist for this newspaper, beginning one piece in 2011 like this: “In the 14th century there were two pandemics. One was the Black Death, the other was the commercialisation of warfare.” He even used to write jokes for Cliff Richard.

It would be tempting in view of all this to call him a renaissance man, except that Jones rather despised the highfalutin Renaissance, preferring the earthiness of medieval times: his first published book was a scholarly reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, arguing that the hero’s fighting and pillaging was being presented satirically by the poet as something deplorable. Later he raided the Norse myth-kitty for the beloved children’s book (and, later, film) The Saga of Erik the Viking. His illustrator told him that Vikings didn’t really wear those massive helmets with horns sticking out at the sides, but Terry insisted on them. Historical accuracy could only get you so far.