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Geoffrey Roy Rush (born 6 July 1951) is an Australian actor and film producer. He is one of the few people who have won the “Triple Crown of Acting”: an Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. He is also the foundation President of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts and was awarded Australian of the Year in 2012.
Rush was born in Toowoomba, Queensland, however his parents divorced when he was five. Rush has an arts degree from the University of Queensland where he was talent-spotted by the Queensland Theatre Company (QTC). In 1975, Rush went to Paris for two years and studied mime, movement and theatre at the L’Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq before resuming his stage career with QTC.
Rush made his film debut in the Australian film Hoodwink in 1981. His next film was Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck, the following year. In the coming years he appeared in small roles on television dramas, including a role as a dentist in a 1993 episode of the British television series Lovejoy. He made his breakthrough performance in 1996 with Shine, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Australian-born actor to win an Oscar.
It was the movie Shine however, that brought Rush to a mass audience where he played musical genius David Helfgott who cracks under the strain of his talent and ends up spending 15 years confined to psychiatric hospitals before being rescued by the love of a good woman (played by Lynn Redgrave in the film). Rush won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Actor for that film and suddenly found himself an in-demand actor.
As he said at the time about all the post-Shine offers being thrown his way: “It’s been a very fulfilling career, and I don’t want to suddenly throw all that out the window and do something trashy that pays a lot of money. But I will have to confront that nasty thing of, well, how much money.
In 2005, Rush won a second Golden Globe, as well as his first Emmy award, this time for portraying the late, great comedic actor Peter Sellers in the TV movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. He has since starred in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies alongside Johnny Depp.
In 2006 Rush joined the cast of the film Candy, a finely-tuned gut-wrencher about the heroin addictions of a poet and art student who become romantically entwined and decide to wed. Rush plays the ultra-liberal professor who first encourages heroin use as experimentation, but later acknowledges the couple’s inseparable, volatile bond to one another other via shared use of the substance. Abbie Cornish and Health Ledger star as the couple alongside Rush.
Rush has been married to actress Jane Menelaus since 1988, to whom he has a daughter, Angelica (born 1992), and a son, James (born 1995). Geoffrey Rush lives in Camberwell, Victoria. |
