Who Was Under the Mask? The Actors Who Played Pennywise in 'It'

For many people, clowns on their own are scary enough. They've never really scared me, but that firefighter clown in Brave Little Toaster certainly did make an impression on my baby self. In more a way like, "Huh. Interesting." Meanwhile, the very idea of him makes my mom shudder.

So take a clown and give him cosmic superpowers to use fear to feed itself for eternity, and you've got a recipe for terror unlike anything else. That's Pennywise from Stephen King's It. And since it's Halloween week, why not revisit this white-faced character hell-bent on capturing kids?

And if you need to check out some other horror behind the scenes, read up on the performers who played Freddy Krueger and Ghostface.

Only two actors have worn Pennywise's greasepaint on screen, but the story of who almost did, and how each one made the clown their own, is a lesson in following an iconic performance without copying it.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

The Original: Tim Curry

For an entire generation of kids, Pennywise had one face, and it belonged to Tim Curry. Curry died at 80 this August. His death sent plenty of fans back to the 1990 miniseries that kept them out of those dang storm drains.

Curry's Pennywise worked because he looked like a normal clown until he didn't. Much of the menace came from his facial expressions and voice, and not from prosthetics, which is what later performances lean more on.

Steve Newton visited Curry on set in 1990 to speak with him for Fangoria. Curry spoke to him during lunch, fully in costume. He said of the character:

…