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Geoffrey Rush
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For anyone fearing that life after 40 is a slow and mortifying descent towards death, the story of Geoffrey Rush must be a real heart-warmer. Engaged in a decades-long battle to keep theatre alive and vibrant in his native Australia, he was utterly unknown to the outside world. Then, in his mid-forties, he nabbed an Oscar for his stunning performance in Shine, and jumped straight to the top of the Hollywood ladder - while STILL finding time for his beloved theatre work, back in Australia.
Geoffrey Rush was born in Toowoomba, Queensland on July 6th, 1951, to an accountant father and shop assistant mother. He moved to Brisbane, when his parents split. After school, Rush took an arts degree at the University of Queensland (the institution years later awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Letters) where, acting in a revue in 1971, he was spotted and recruited by the Queensland Theatre Company.
In 1975, Rush took off for Paris for a couple of years, and studied mime and pantomime at the famous Jacques Le Coq School Of Mime, then returned to Australia to resume his stage career. He headlined, alongside Mel Gibson (with whom he once shared an apartment), in a production of Waiting For Godot then, in the early Eighties, joined Jim Sharman's Lighthouse troupe (Sharman having directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its follow-up Shock Treatment). In 1984, he was part of a syndicate that bought Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre, and helped form Neil Armfield's Company B. The early Eighties also brought his first screen roles, opposite Judy Davis in Hoodwink, then playing a floor manager in Starstruck, wherein a teenager tries to help his cousin to fame as a singer.
His study in Paris led Rush in some strange theatrical directions. He put on his own show, Clowneroonies, was magnificent as The Fool in King Lear, and won critics awards as the lead in Gogol's Diary Of A Madman. Eventually, this succession of sometimes comic but more often painfully intense roles took him close to burn-out, and he was forced to take on lighter parts, like the role of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in an Australian movie version of Twelfth Night, co-directed by Kenneth Branagh. In 1988, he married stage actress Jane Menelaus and, for their honeymoon, they toured for six months together in a production of The Importance Of Being Earnest. "(Every night) I got to propose to my wife in Oscar Wilde's beautiful language", he later recalled happily, "and I got paid for it". The couple have two children - Angelica (born in 1992) and James (1995). Jane would later appear in his hit movie Quills.
Throughout this period, Rush was running the Belvoir Street Theatre Company and helping many an aspiring actor get started. In 1992, encouraged by house-mate Lindy Davies, he went to see a play featuring a recently graduated Cate Blanchett and, hugely impressed, picked her to star alongside him in David Mamet's Oleanna. Soon she'd also play Ophelia in the Belvoir's Hamlet.
Career-wise, 1995 took Rush to a new level. He appeared as the near-mute Dave in On Our Selection, and once more with Judy Davis in Children Of The Revolution (as her reticent husband). But his big break came with Shine, based on the tale of disturbed pianist/composer David Helfgott who made a successful stage comeback after years spent in psychiatric homes. Rush first saw the script in 1992 and was enthused. He befriended the Helfgotts, who lived close-by in Bellingen, New South Wales, and visited them often, studying David's speech and movements. He reacquainted himself with the piano, which he'd studied at school, and used his vast experience in mime to get through the parts he couldn't actually play. He was perfect for the role. As the movie's director, Scott Hicks remarked "He always seemed to play characters - like the Fool in King Lear, and the lead in Diary Of A Madman - whose minds wander the finer edges of sanity". But, perfect of not, he almost didn't get it, the financiers demanding a name actor for the part. Only after a long period of persistent persuasion and terrible frustration was the part his.
Of course, as David Helfgott, Rush was a sensation. He took the 1997 Best Actor Oscar and, when receiving a Golden Globe, he held his award aloft and dedicated it "to all those people who were happy to bankroll the film as long as I wasn't in it". He won a BAFTA for Shine too, as he did the following year for his performance as the sly, murderous Sir Francis Walsingham, Cate Blanchett's advisor and assassin in Elizabeth. The plaudits just kept coming. He was again Oscar-nominated, as Best Supporting Actor, for Shakespeare In Love and, in joking reference to Joseph Fiennes, his co-star in Elizabeth and Shakespeare In Love, said "He got to make love to Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett. All I got was an Oscar nomination". Then came Quills, and another Oscar nomination for his show-stopping turn as the jailed Marquis de Sade, at the same time inspirational and sinister.
In the meantime, there were other notable roles. He was hilariously wired and camp as the super-villain Casanova Frankenstein, alongside William H. Macy, Paul Reubens and Tom Waits in Mystery Men and, if possible, was even more outlandish as the fiendish master-mind in the superior horror movie House On Haunted Hill. And, being Geoffrey Rush, he kept up his commitment to Australian theatre. Having earlier directed the QTC's production of The Merry Wives Of Windsor, now he co-adapted and starred in Beaumarchais' The Marriage Of Figaro, with which he opened the new Optus Playhouse in the Queensland Performing Arts Complex in Brisbane.
As if making up for his slow start in films, Rush entered the new millennium in a whirlwind of activity. John Boorman's The Tailor Of Panama saw him acting as a spy for ruthless British agent Pierce Brosnan. Julie Taymor's magical-realist biopic Frida had him as Leon Trotsky, engaging in an affair with Salma Hayek's Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Then came The Banger Sisters where ex-groupie Goldie Hawn decides to hook up once more with her now respectable ex-colleague Susan Sarandon. On the way to Phoenix, she picks up Rush, a frustrated screenwriter armed with a gun and one bullet which he intends to fire into his father. Expert at playing sensitive and disturbed men, he made a superb foil for Hawn's kindhearted and surprisingly wise slapper.
In the meantime, of course, there would be Australian productions, too. Lantana was a Short Cuts-style piece where differing lives are pulled violently together. Here Geoffrey played the husband of psychiatrist Barbara Hershey, traumatised by the death of their daughter and so twisted by self-loathing he can only incriminate himself when Hershey herself is murdered. Then there was Swimming Upstream, a fraught family drama based on the life of champion swimmer Tony Fingleton, Rush playing the boy's father - mum being Judy Davis, who'd earlier appeared in Geoffrey's debut Hoodwink.
2003 would be his busiest and most successful year yet. He enjoyed a $300 million hit by lending his voice to Finding Nemo. Then came more box-office glory with Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl where he played crazy undead buccaneer Barbossa, intent upon murdering Keira Knightley and hounded by Johnny Depp's masterfully louche Jack Sparrow. He'd follow this up with Ned Kelly where he was the merciless Superintendant Hare, tracking Heath Ledger's titular outlaw with 100 good men and true. Then there would be Intolerable Cruelty (so flamboyant and strange, he just had to work with the Coen brothers at some point) where vengeful gold-digger Catherine Zeta-Jones goes after womanising lawyer George Clooney - Rush donning a pony-tail and gleaning big laughs as the husband of one of Clooney's clients.
2004 would bring another huge challenge when Rush signed up for the lead in HBO's The Life and Death Of Peter Sellers. Understanding the shaky balance between the comic's shyness and extroversion, his intelligence and wackiness, his depression and creative highs, Geoffrey delivered a stunning performance insiders claimed to be nothing short of uncanny. Little wonder that he moved on to Eric Idle's infinitely lighter Merchant-Ivory spoof The Remains Of The Piano, starring as a stuffy aristocrat alongside his Frida co-star Alfred Molina and Pirates buddy Orlando Bloom.
Now deservedly respected in Hollywood, with over 70 theatre productions under his belt, AND happily married, Geoffrey Rush should be a happy man indeed.
Dominic Wills
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