How essential is curiosity? This is going to be a rather soft question, I am not completely sure it is appropriate for this place. But still.

In your opinion, how important is the presence of strong curiosity (passion for research) in a researcher for him/her to become very successful in science? Here I mean really big success (like getting top awards and/or reshaping a research area significantly) and really in science (not including management achievements, or high numbers of supervised successful PhDs or things alike).

There are many people doing research who consider (or start to consider after a while) their research-related activity as "just a job" like, say, an engineering or a carpenter one, just with a different range of required activities. So these people are not driven by a strong feeling of curiosity. Sometimes they are very hardworking and get a lot of important results, but I am not sure they get to the top (in fact, I just do not have enough data to judge).

So a second part of my question (and partly a clarification of the first one) is: do you know


examples of people who got to the top and did not have curiosity?
examples of people who are very curious, stay in research for a long time, but did not get to the top? (better if such person is somewhat known so that his/her biography could be found)
A non-answer: curiosity is not the same as "passion for research", if the latter refers to the contemporary commodified version of "research". Exactly as in the question, some clever people see that their "diddlings" could get funding from some funding agency, and "go for it", without really sincerely caring about the issue they pretend to address. Srsly.

"Academe" is a sort of game that is in fact not so wildly different from "business", although its conceits and minor dynamics are different. The major dynamics are self-confidence, ... and bluffing, up to a point. "Bluster", for sure. 

I do think that the individuals who bluff-and-bluster in academe are sometimes less sociopathic than "business people", if, or when, they stay well back from wrecking the pension plans of millions of people. Faint praise, yes.

More directly, I have observed that many people find that their naive, early-life perceptions of any given thing was naive... Special case: academe.

Pro-tip [sic], lotta people who know what they're doing are "not noisy"... that is, do not violently broadcast nonsense. 

I do also seriously think that the question is not "can one be a success in academe without buying into the myth of endless curiosity" (which is the best possible myth), but "will I be able to pay a modest mortgage and have health insurance for my family...?" This is a tougher question, and depends on local social politics. 

Fairy tale: once upon a time, I thought I'd just live till I keeled over at the blackboard... but then there were kids, aging parents, aging spouses, kids-again, ...

"Wait, what was the question?" :)