Tim Curry, the British-born actor whose gift for garish eccentricity lit up stage and screen, most notably as the outlandish, cross-dressing mad scientist in the midnight cult film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” died on Tuesday. He was 80.

The death was confirmed by Marcia Hurwitz, his longtime agent and manager. In 2012, Mr. Curry suffered a serious stroke, from which, he said last year, “I’ve been recovering for quite a long time.”

With a mischief-maker’s good looks, a casual athletic grace and a supple and resonant voice, Mr. Curry was a favorite in roles calling for expressive villainy or general cartoonishness.

In the first screen version of “Annie” (1982), adapted from the comic strip turned stage musical and directed by John Huston, he brought more than a dollop of slime to the part of Rooster Hannigan, the con artist who concocts a plot to kidnap the plucky orphan of the title.

In “Clue” (1985), a suspense spoof derived from the popular board game, he played Wadsworth, a logorrheic butler who leads a cast full of murder suspects (played by Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan and others) around a spooky mansion with the speed-speaking fervor of a manic Sherlock Holmes.

As a greedy gazillionaire presumed to be the chief malefactor in “Charlie’s Angels,” the 2000 movie adaptation of the television series about three female detectives, Mr. Curry laid on the oily self-satisfaction until the moment he was killed by the real bad guy.

And in “Spamalot,” the stage musical based on the Monty Python troupe’s bottomlessly goofy retelling of the King Arthur legend, which opened on Broadway in 2005, he played Arthur himself and was nominated for a Tony Award. It was the most straight-faced role in the show, and yet, as Ben Brantley wrote in his New York Times review, he was “the best of the cast at translating classic Python style into a musical-comedy idiom.”

“His stalwart, plummy-voiced Arthur wears a smile as inflexible as armor,” Mr. Brantley wrote, “and it deflects any suggestion that this manly king is in on the show’s jokes.”

No other role marked Mr. Curry’s career as emphatically, however, as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania,” as he proclaimed himself in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the 1975 screen adaptation of “The Rocky Horror Show,” the hit London stage musical that played for seven years in different theaters, and in which Mr. Curry originated the role in 1973. He also starred in the premiere American production in Los Angeles in 1974 and on Broadway in 1975, where it was a notable flop, closing after 45 performances.

Although Frank-N-Furter would become Mr. Curry’s signature role, he initially had doubts about taking it. “I was hesitant in that, if it worked, it might be a difficult image to shake off,” he said in a television interview in England just as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” was opening in 1975. “But then, really, I’ve always thought it wasn’t worth doing unless you took a risk, really. So I just took the risk.”

Forty years later, when he received a lifetime achievement award from the Actors Fund, Los Angeles magazine asked him to reflect on his career-making role. How did he look at it in retrospect?

“With a sort of bemused tolerance,” he said. “It’s neither a blessing nor a curse. I was lucky to get it.”

A complete obituary will be published soon.