Still doing the Time Warp: Nell Campbell on 50 years of Rocky Horror

Sunday, 1 March 2026

It was supposed to run for three weeks in 1973 in the attic of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Australian actor Nell Campbell was 19 and paid £18 a week; it was her first professional role in England. By the time rehearsals started, British-New Zealand creator Richard O’Brien hadn’t even finished the script.

Fifty years later, Campbell is still talking about her sequin-clad character Columbia ‒ and the world is still doing the Time Warp.

Turned into a film in 1975 that enraptured queer communities with its camp chaos, the rock and roll show ‒ a cult celebration of all shades of sexuality ‒ has again returned to New Zealand stages for a tour, covering a run in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington through late March, and starring Stephen Webb as the scandalous Dr Frank-N-Furter, and New Zealand’s Kristian Lavercombe as The Narrator.

For Campbell, 72, the production ‒ which has been seen by more than 35 million theatregoers in 30 countries ‒ has undoubtedly been life-changing.

“It’s very much alive. To use the word profound, referring to a musical based on Frankenstein … seems a bit of a stretch but, as it happened, it has had a profound effect on so many people, most especially the LGBTQ+ community. And that is the greatest thing about it,” Campbell says.

Sipping a creamy iced coffee from her home in Sydney, and speaking to the Star-Times via video link, Campbell cannot believe it’s been more than 50 years since she first stepped into Columbia’s glittery tap shoes.

Part groupie, part lover of mad scientist and main character/antagonist Dr Frank-N-Furter, and part castle servant, Campbell says it’s almost as if Columbia instead stepped into her shoes, rather than the other way around.

Recently, the actor was asked to record a birthday message for a fan of hers, age 7.

“Her parents let her watch all the musical numbers in the film; she knows them all off by heart. That’s several generations. … I’m just so grateful to have been a part of the original stage production. It was developed as we rehearsed. We had no idea.”

The Rocky Horror story follows two squeaky clean college kids, Brad and his fiancée Janet, who, by a twist of fate, find themselves stranded outside a mysterious mansion. Fun, frolicking, frocks and frivolity ensue.

Campbell credits the production’s success to its original star-studded creative team: director Jim Sharman; set designer Brian Thomson; costume designer Sue Blane; musical director Richard Hartley; and of course, the brilliant, quirky and stylish O’Brien, with his leopard suits and high wedge boots.

“I think if you take any of those people out of the mix, it wouldn’t be the same at all. … [Sharman] would just go, ‘Oh, well I think that Janet needs a song to express her flowering sexuality’. And Richard would just go home and come back the next day with the song,” Campbell says.

“I’m sure [O’Brien] would agree, that … if he had played the songs to any other director, you wouldn’t have heard of it again.”

The other vital ingredient, of course, was the casting of actor Tim Curry as Dr Frank-N-Furter, the pansexual mad scientist transvestite alien who wears fishnets, heels, and is generally a flamboyant, gender non-conforming hedonist.

“Tim blew it into the stratosphere. His sex appeal resonated with all,” Campbell says.

Right from the start, there was a focus on casting oddball, interesting people in the roles, she added. While O’Brien wanted to use the original theatre cast for the film adaptation, studio 20th Century Fox insisted Brad and Janet were American.

When Barry Bostwick arrived at his audition for Brad with Susan Sarandon, this led to her also being cast as Janet. “And of course, they were just fantastic.”

The stage show opened in London at a time when punk was on the horizon; Vivienne Westwood had opened her first boutique on Kings Rd a couple years prior; the 60s had passed and the city was “already way beyond the shockable”, Campbell says.

However, importantly, gay sex between men had only been legalised in England six years before the show’s debut, in 1967.

A contrast to depressing, bleak and futureless gay content represented in film and theatre up until that point, Rocky Horror instead represented a celebration of every part of the rainbow community ‒ and sexuality more generally.

So much so, in fact, that the original Janet actor, Julie Covington, who played the role for six weeks, needed convincing by Sharman to sing Toucha-Toucha-Touch Me, shocked at its explicit messaging.

With countless shadow casts, callbacks, and midnight screenings of the film in many languages since then, Campbell is a bit shocked herself, that society has not become as accepting of queer communities as she wanted to believe would happen, 50 years ago.

“It is with great sadness that it hasn’t become like that.”

Cartoonish, vulnerable, devastating, and dressed in a gold sequin top hat and bow, Campbell says she sort of made Columbia an exaggerated version of herself: a “ridiculously over-sensitive extrovert”.

At the time she was first cast in the show aged 19, she’d only been in the United Kingdom for a little more than a year.

Still, today, the actor appears at conventions, signs her autograph, and hears stories about how the show changed people’s lives.

One young married woman in her mid-20s recently told Campbell that her parents had their first date at The Rocky Horror Show. She said her mother lost her virginity twice that night: once, her Rocky Horror virginity, the other, her actual.

The product of a Rocky Horror romance herself, the woman astoundingly met her own partner at a Rocky Horror screening as well.

In addition to acting, Campbell went on to operate the Manhattan nightclub Nell’s from 1986 through the 1990s, and also owned two New York restaurants until she had her daughter Matilda. Later in life she developed a one-woman show, All’s Nell That Ends Nell, in which she talks everything Rocky Horror, and which also covers her range of lives: the London life, the New York life, the Sydney life …

“I’ve been very, very lucky in my life,” Campbell says. “I wish I had more acting roles. I wish I’d worked more. But a creative person never retires. I’m always up for anything. And when I say that, I do mean anything,” she laughs.

But does she ever tire of being introduced as Columbia? Or is the character more like an old friend at this point?

“Actually, no-one has asked me that. Most people would use the word pride; but I don’t really have pride. I’m just very grateful. … I never mind being referred to as Columbia. Because I adore the film so much and all the effects it’s had. But I suppose sometimes when somebody at a party introduces me like that, it’s like saying, ‘she’s 570 years old and look at her now’.

“If I ever get an obituary, that will be how they describe me. I’ve never minded that that’s been the main association. No, no, not at all. I’m thrilled. I’ve been thrilled to be part of the Rocky Horror journey.”

The Rocky Horror Show directed by Christopher Luscombe plays at Auckland’s The Civic, Feb 26-Mar 8, tickets from Ticketmaster; Christchurch’s Isaac Theatre Royal, Mar 11-15, tickets from Ticketek; Wellington’s St James Theatre, Mar 18-29, tickets from Ticketmaster