Actor Geoffrey Rush: ‘I was told I should be on an Australian soap'

Telegraph

08-04-2025

Geoffrey Rush, 73, is an Australian actor who won the 1996 Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of concert pianist David Helfgott in Shine. Rush won a BAFTA Award for that performance, too, then picked up the Best Supporting Actor gong at the British ceremony for his turns in Shakespeare In Love and The King's Speech. Rush also has an Emmy and a Tony, making him the only Australian to have landed the Triple Crown of Acting. Audiences will also recognise Rush from the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, Elizabeth, and Munich, while they might have heard his voice in Finding Nemo and Minions.
Best childhood memory?
I have to take you back to the late 1950s when I was eight. I lived in Toowoomba. My ancestry is farmers, we're working class people. I had this Meccano set. That was as much fun as you could have by yourself in those days. My playtime was preoccupied with making these small cut-out theatre stages from a shoe box. I was a latch key kid, my mom had no child support. She worked in a department store.
In the holiday period, we still had this phenomenal vestige of vaudeville. There was a company called Sorlies and in the holiday period they travelled and performed in a tent, which seated about 800 people. When the curtains went up, it would be packed with kids of my own age. My mom and her friends would tell us to walk a mile away to see Jack And The Beanstalk or Cinderella. We'd come back and they'd say, 'We could hear you all screaming your lungs out.' That was so indelible. That's where I discovered what theatre was. They only performed in rural areas. I'm sure if I went back now the tent would seem much smaller. I've worked with actors who did it but they all closed in 1961. TV ended it. But when I was eight it was terribly exciting.
Best moment of your career?
Making my first ever entrance onto a Broadway stage. I never expected that and it was particularly significant for me. It was Eugène Ionesco's absurdist Exit The King, which I had co-translated with the director Neil Armfield, a long term colleague of mine. We'd done it in Sydney and Melbourne. I knew it backwards. Susan Sarandon was in it. That was kind of spooky, because she was the person who presented me with my Oscar. She had won it the year before Shine (for Dead Man Walking). I'd sat in Broadway theatres watching musicals and plays. I just had a hunch that Manhattan audiences would get it, because they can be very adventurous and feral. I remember going to see Chicago and they were grooving to it. They were rocking.
Best day of your life?
My wife and I had to go through an IVF program to find out why we weren't having kids. She was an actress as well, and there's a lot of science involved. It ended up that we had to get counselling. You meet all these other parents and couples who are trying to have children. It's an unpredictable path. We were going to store eight embryos which would last in liquid nitrogen for 500 years, or something crazy like that. Melbourne was one of the IVF hubs, as Britain was. Anyway, the birth happened beautifully, and our daughter was held up in front of us. We both said, 'It feels like we've known her all our lives.' That young person is now 32. I can see in her personality that she is hardwired and has this pluckiness. My wife Jane and I saw her separate from two to four cells on a TV screen. So, thank you, science.
Best holiday?
It's back to the late 1950s. You had to create your own curiosity and brighten up your own imagination. There was only radio. We'd go on holidays on the Gold Coast, just outside of Brisbane. The Gold Coast is still a phenomenal place. We'd drive down there. We'd sit in the back of my grandfather's ute, with no seat belts. There is a very big US influence. The Americans, led by Douglas MacArthur, had set up there in the war. When we got surf music that really meant something in Australia because we had surf comps.
I was scared of the surf, but I loved the whole beach culture. They'd have competitive sing-alongs over who could sing the loudest. Then you might win a frankfurter smothered in deep fried batter. I was radio savvy, though. I used to listen to the hit parade: they'd play it on the beach. We'd get a mixture of British and Californian culture. We had a guy there who would spray you with mutton bird oil. I didn't know what a mutton bird looked like. I just imagined that this guy, before he came to the beach, put mutton birds in a blender or something.
I think most people have melanomas as a result of that. But it was exciting. I must admit, when I first went to Britain, and someone took me to Brighton, I kind of laughed at the beach. I went, 'What? This is stone!' There's a beautiful poem by Philip Larkin where he talks about baby lambs opening their eyes at spring to the Earth's immeasurable surprise. That kind of nails that experience for me.
Worst childhood memory?
When we moved to Brisbane, I moved in with my grandparents and my uncle. It was a housing commission estate. My grandfather was ex-police force. He would gather the rent. I think everyone had false teeth because it was economically better. This is only 14 years post the Second World War or something. They always had them in a glass by the bed with a Steradent in them because they didn't want to pay recurring annual dental bills.
So going to the dentist always felt pretty freaky. This is pre-fluoride. You'd tell the dentist, 'I've got a terrible toothache.' He'd give you oil of cloves or something. It sounds Dickensian. But the dentist was a nightmare. His name was Mr Wilde. He seemed to need to put four massive needles of anaesthetic through the gum, straight onto the bone, then straddle the chair with pliers. You could just hear it cracking out. It was horrendous.
You knew that it was going to come up once or twice a year. Maybe playing Nigel the pelican in Finding Nemo was my therapy. My dentist wasn't as quaint and as cute as that. All the kids were ashen faced waiting to go in. My mum worked, too, so I was there by myself – at least the others had a parent there.
Worst moment of your career?
I have fallen off stage. I think most actors have because they didn't know the stage well enough. There's something about theatre that I think is fascinatingly adversarial. When I first went to London, I auditioned for a very high end institution. I won't name them. One day I went for an audition. I had terrible flu. I was very depressed. I'd been working in my other job. I did a speech. I thought it went well. But this guy, I could tell he took a dislike to me. He had an attitude of, 'Maybe you should be in a soap opera on Australian television.'
He was wearing a cream-beige cable-knit polo-neck sweater with dark-tan elephant cords and side-length dark-brown boots. Then he said, 'I want you to think you're Adam and you're waking up on the first day of your life. Just take it all in your own time.' I did my best blinking. I looked around. I reacted to Eve being there. He just went, 'I don't believe you.' I'm looking at him, his outfit and his attitude, and I thought, 'Ditto.' That's what pushed me to go to study with Jacques Lecoq in Paris. I didn't want to do more repertory. I'd done that in Queensland. I felt more adventurous. I went to this cosmopolitan school in Paris. I knew very little French, I met people that I still know. We had our 50th Zoom anniversary during COVID. I thought, 'Who were all these geriatrics out there? Oh, they're all my mates.'
Worst job?
I worked for Manpower. It was a temp agency. But I really wanted an artistic life. The closest I got was carrying sterile water to the operating theatre. I worked for some British beef company. The office was like a German Expressionism set. It was this crooked five-storey building and we were down in the basement. We'd have to walk with a folder all the way up or catch a bus down Fleet Street. This was pre-fax. This one guy told me to just walk, rather than getting the bus, but to still expense the bus. That got me an extra 9p. I'd grab the newspaper in the morning and take it up to my boss. On the way I'd do the crossword cryptically, or look at the clues. His secretary would shout at me and make me iron the newspaper because it mustn't arrive creased. I was living in a squat in Tolmers Square. No locks or bolts on the doors. But it was free. I cleaned some offices at one point for Manpower. Then 24 years later, I was in London to shoot some scenes for Shine. We were staying in a hotel in South Kensington. I looked out and I said to my piano coach, 'See that office building down there. I used to clean that at five o'clock in the morning. And today I'm going off to shoot a scene with Sir John Gielgud!' That sadly got cut from the film. But at least I can tell you about it now!
Absolute worst thing ever?
Being an artist, particularly from Down Under, where we had a long period of no film-making from the 1930s to the 1970s. Then we had a renaissance, as it were. But you didn't think of it ever really being a career. In the early 1990s, I'd been working since I was 20 so I was in my mid-40s. For whatever reason, I started to have dreadful panic attacks. Once I started talking to everyone else, they were the same. But they were also on medication and doing transcendental meditation. But that threw me for a bit. I think it was to do with the birth of my daughter. I remember thinking, 'How am I going to do this? I don't have money in the bank! I've got to think about education.' Funnily enough, it sorted itself out. Because the second feature film I did was Shine. Suddenly I had to go to LA a lot. Every two weeks I was being flown out for a better type of TV interview. That's where I got to meet my hero, Chuck Jones, who created the Warner Brothers cartoons. Meeting him, John Gielgud, and eventually Barry Humphries, who became a great friend – he was always this beacon in Australia – those were serious career highlights.