Rush
A GAME OF SCRABBLE WITH GEOFFREY RUSH
(Crossing minds and swords with Captain Barbossa)
(c) David Astle
Rush has 38 meanings in the Macquarie Dictionary. The word can mean a torrent, a buzz, the wallop of a croquet mallet, a film print or a flimsy weed partial to low bogs. Primarily of course rush means to hurry, but you won’t find much haste in the man before you.
Almost the antonym of speed, Geoffrey Rush sits cooped on the couch, a pair of half-moon specs atop that patrician nose, staring at his Scrabble rack. “So what do I do?” he asks. “There’s no scoring is there?”
The game is Story Scrabble, I say. “You play a word, and that word may trigger a memory, a yarn, anything that jumps to mind.” Rush rubs his jaw. He seems unsold, unbitten. He’s certainly unhurried.
He removes the specs, leans into the couch. “I remember telling Joaquin Phoenix [a Quills costar] that he should have a middle name like Zachariah, or Zachary. Get those letters on a Triple Word Score and you’d kill ’em.”
Who needs a board game to tell stories? “The other one is Orlando Bloom,” he says, invoking a fellow pirate, “with 4 Os in his name. I always tell him, ‘You’ve got more than your fair share.’”
Rush: press of work, business etc, requiring extraordinary effort…
Like Bloom, Rush carries his share of characters, from a pelican in Nemo to a gay junkie in Candy. The man is a multitude. Swirl the letters in his name and you spell GRUFFY HEROES, a fate he’s fulfilled across a 35-year career with genius. To think that protean body holds a Spanish mutineer, a French marquis, a Mossad agent, naming three.
Counting his roles is a folly – as Peter Sellers alone the Brizzie boy hijacked 38 characters in a single biopic. More than a resume, his career is a jaw-dropping roll-call, from Snoopy onstage to a Les Mis cop, from David Helfgott in Shine to a Godot tramp. He’s swung from a cut-snake Russian (Diary of a Madman) to a Magic Pudding koala. To the timeline add a dozen arch Elizabethans, and enough BAFTAs, Oscars and Emmys to smelt into a crown.
Comb-proof, his wild hair is still kinked from the traces of a crown. A few days earlier, Geoffrey finished a one-month reign as Berenger in Exit the King, an Ionesco play at Melbourne’s Malthouse. “Eight shows a week is getting tougher,” he confesses. “You don’t bounce back as quickly.”
In fairness, the king’s role was massive – two hours a night – four with a matinee – tumbling and ranting till death usurped him at curtain. Who wouldn’t be knackered? But Geoffrey is quick to claim his frailty, his very human side. Just as he dubs his latest success – living in the skin of Captain Barbossa – as “dressing up to play pirates”.
The captain himself looms above us. The promo poster for Pirates 3 (At World’s End) adorns the walls of the Buena Vista offices, in Melbourne. I’m sure most A-list actors would ignore the image, or mutely bathe in its glow. Not Rush. He betrays a boy’s excitement, telling you secrets in his rich tenor. “They had us in harnesses for these photos. You had to lean right out to get an action shot.” He studies himself – a suburban Dad of two thrilling at the buccaneer he sees staring back in the mirror. “I love the smoky tones they’ve done.”
Rush resumes his seat to confess another secret – synaesthesia. Where you and I see days of the week as so many boxes on a calendar, the actor sees colours: “Friday is dark maroon,” he reckons, “a type of sienna, and Saturday is definitely white. Monday is a cool blue.” The attribute he links to his Brisbane childhood. “Since I was seven, when I first learnt counting I suppose, I’ve had this strong numberline notion which resonates with colour.”
Suddenly Rush notices a Scrabble board in front of him. His cuttlefish hands (long planes fringed by lacy fingers) play with tiles on his rack. “Numbers have specific colours as well,” he adds, never fully done with any one question. “My kids [Angelica 13, James 11] say, ‘Dad you’re not abnormal, you’re not different – you’re just crazy.’”
Rush, Australian History: an attempted escape of a convict
Rush’s own timeline is colourful, and deeply Australian. Dad Roy left home when Geoffrey was five. Merle, a sales assistant, moved from Toowoomba to Brisbane, where a shearing stepdad joined the picture. “Out of the sandiest, rockiest soil, stuff blooms,” says the actor. He recalls his Mum as “the jiver, a truly spirited woman, generous towards whatever direction I was going in.”
That direction was thespian. “I toured Queensland a number of times (with the Queensland Theatre Company) in the early 70s. I remember sitting out on balcony of some big sprawling pub in Barcaldine. We were a bit hippyish, we had long hair and probably floral shirts. And you hear these guys saying ‘It’s those horses’ hooves from Brisbane.’” He pauses, chuckles. “We must have been pooves, I guess.”
The boy fled the colony for Paris in 1975 to fathom the sorcery of mime. “Not this,” he clarifies, pulling aside an invisible drape to peek out, purse-lipped. “But what I call top-to-toe acting, learning to use you body in transcendent ways.”
Our mired Scrabble game strays into master class. The key to performance is not to illustrate, Rush elaborates, but “to fill the silhouette”. Mime artists call it identification. The role of Peter Sellers, say, was never an identikit exercise, but the challenge of being Sellers, living his life within, and letting all parts reflect that life. The keys to grasping any role are “quiet study” and a PhD in empathy – or “embedding the emotional memory”.
“Acting is very much like painting,” adds Rush. “You play around with tones. A role may need more cool, more warmth. There is no real end point. You never stop defining.” Paint is foremost in Geoffrey’s mind, thanks to the passion of his wife, Jane Menelaus. “In the last few years she’s been doing more and more stuff. Her style is Lucien Freud – bold, not photographic, more a feel of what she’s looking at, with this radical use of colour for skin tones.”
The two actors tied the celebrant knot in 1988, on the eve of costarring in The Importance of Being Earnest. With Geoffrey as bachelor John Worthing, and Jane as comely Gwendolen Fairfax, the newlyweds had the chance to re-propose in Wildean abandon every single day – twice with matinees.
So has the painting bug bitten, I ask. “I own quite a big palette and a reasonable range of expression when it comes to objectifying [with my body]. But on paper it’s only stick figures.”
Rush himself is something of the stick figure. I throw him the surefire adjectives that profilers have chosen to describe the star: rumpled, windswept, gangly, coiled, Play-doh and lived-in. Rush sniggers. “You forgot lanky. I’m always called lanky.” He drains his sweet latte, care of Disney. “Most of those words crop up because I do interviews for the next project the day after I’ve finished the last one, after drinking all night with my mates…”
So we miss your inner glamour? “What I should start saying is I can’t do interviews until I’m fully rested, I’ve done my walk and I’ve put on all my face products. Then people will say I’m gleaming and cunningly handsome!”
Inspired, the cuttlefish dance on the board. Tiles plunk into place and both of us stare down at a remarkable word spelt across the centre, a red rag for any profiler, and almost a question in itself: DRIVEN.
Rush, colloquial: to put pressure on (someone)
“I’ve seen ambition in the theatre,” he replies. “I think I have it but I keep those demons low. I’ve been around long enough to know my strength is my more thoughtful reflective side. I really chew things over before making a decision.”
At home in Camberwell, the steepled east of Melbourne, Geoffrey keeps a notebook. “I write down all the roles I’ve turned down [or missed out on getting]. Occasionally, I’ll look back at the list and kick myself, but there’s very little by way of regret in there.”
Well, okay, maybe there was one, he admits. “Roman Polanski was going to do Oliver Twist, and I just wanted to play Fagin. It was one of those films I’d seen as a kid. I love the Alec Guinness performance. And then I thought there’s been 28 other people who have done that: what else? I’m just entering into a sausage thing in a way.” Rush reached a shortlist of three before the gig went to Ben Kingsley. No matter, say the fingers. An actor can’t dwell too long.
Existing in two continents – half the year movie-making offshore, and half rejuvenating in Melbourne – is a regular menace to family life. But over time, love and sanity have shaped the schedule. “Most projects are a 3-month package. We’ve been pretty lucky with Pirates – a lot of that fell over our summer holidays here. So for December and January, Jane and the kids could come over to LA [or the Caribbean] and hang out.
“The Pirates filmset is a breeze for kids – you’ve got the sword master and the Special FX guys. I say, ‘Go watch what they do.’ They watch polystyrene planks, crusted in barnacles, getting packed with mortar, and then blown out for the shot.” Any aspiring dolly-grippers in the family, I ask. “Too early,” smiles Geoffrey. “Though James likes getting on the cans…and listening to all the chatter from the Artistic Director.”
I play the word PRICKING – since old scoring habits die hard – and ask after the actor’s ego. Does it bother him, with theatre locked in the moment, that film will be his only legacy? The monkey on your back, I suggest, is to be known exclusively as the man with a monkey on his shoulder.
Captain Barbossa, in misty 2-D, stares daggers, awaiting his portrayer’s answer. “I suppose that may happen,” he grins, not troubled – but the pricking works. “Theatre doesn’t rate in mainstream press unless it’s gossip driven,” he laments. “We’re still in the dying phases of celebrity culture.”
So what about Rush: A Life? When’s the auto-bio coming out? “The only time I get inspired to write a book is when we do those chats with students [after stage performances] and I feel the 40-year gulf.” He wavers, as if he’s stumbled on the book’s title. “We get these excited groups coming in, there’s a real inquiry going on. The trap with memoir is knowing there’s a genre for the narcissistic, the lovey-lovey biography.”
Rush, chiefly US, colloquial: to heap attentions on (someone)
“Geoffrey is gracious,” says Claire Dobbin, a long-time friend and Chair of the Melbourne International Film Festival, of which Rush is patron. “When he’s in a room he will seek out people he doesn’t know and talk to them.
“He’s very thoughtful, deeply intellectual and an irresistible clown,” she adds. “He understands the ephemeral nature of celebrity, and there are bigger things underpinning everything. I’ve never heard him start a story with ‘When I was with Johnny Depp…’”
Gillian Jones, a fellow actor, and Queen to his recent Berenger, says “I’ve known him for 27 years, and in that time he’s become more and more Geoffrey. He’s meticulous. He works away on things. He invents things, but he’s got this wonderful capacity to be.”
To be who, exactly? I wonder what big role is waiting in the actor’s wings. In spirit, Rush seems destined to revive Don Quixote, and Rush can’t disagree. “Have you read the book? It’s brutally funny. People think the story romantic, but there’s this klutz with big dreams who has the bejesus knocked out of him one night in a tavern, and he has to deal with that. It’s so compelling and alarmingly modern. The character appeals. He belongs to that non-heroic outsider lineage.”
As does Rush, in a funny way. A Hollywood star without a single dab of product. A silver-screen exile at peace in the suburbs. In a coming Macquarie we can look forward to the new noun of Rushness, variably defined as 1) easygoing charisma, or 2) an acute sense of self, tempered by grace, intellect and cutlass wit, or 3) an aversion to gossip, red carpet and haste.
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SIDEBAR: RUSH-IAN SPIRIT – some “playful kickoff points” for Rush’s roles
Poprischin (Diary of a Madman, Belvoir, 1989) – a delusional clerk partway refracted from Leunig’s Mr Curly and imagining “Tony Hancock as a ham-radio operator”
David Helfgott (Shine, 1996) – four months of piano tuition, close study of David’s speech patterns, and such trivial details as how Helfgott smokes or adjusts his glasses
Clint (Small Poppies, Sydney Festival, 2000) – “My kids at the time were 5 and 7 and when Jane saw it she said you just spliced both children into that performance.”
Marquis de Sade (Quills, 2001) – blend a mountain goat and peacock (images cited in de Sade biographies), with a fallen glam-rocker (director Kaufman’s idea) and voila
Peter Sellers (2004) – binged on Sellers films – both big-screen and Super8. Plus a remark from director Hopkins: Men are really sad sometimes and sometimes very stupid and vain and pathetic – and fantastic.”
[Sunday Life magazine, May 2007]