Rush secures triple crown

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Tags: Arts, awards and prizes, centenary-edition, performing arts

Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon in the Broadway production of Exit the King. Images courtesy Boneau/Bryan-Brown

When UQ alumnus Geoffrey Rush won a Tony award for his Broadway performance in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King in June, he was anointed as acting royalty. He is one of only 16 actors – and the first Australian – to win the so-called triple crown: an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony.

The triple crown means mastery in three media: film, television and stage. In 1953, Thomas Mitchell, best known for his role as Scarlett O’Hara’s father in Gone with the Wind, was the first actor to put all three trophies on his mantelpiece, and since then triple crowners have included Paul Scofield, Vanessa Redgrave, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith and Al Pacino. This puts Rush in some distinguished company.

It is the culmination of a career that, after its achievements, is striking in its modesty. For all his fame and multiple honours, Rush has always been an actor first.

Unlike Russell Crowe or Nicole Kidman, Rush has never embraced the celebrity circus of Hollywood. He lives in Melbourne with his wife, actress Jane Menelaus and their two children. Of our internationally celebrated home boys and girls, Rush is perhaps most like Cate Blanchett. Perhaps this isn’t surprising; Rush picked Blanchett to co-star with him in David Mamet’s Oleanna, her first big stage role, recognising her luminous talent when she had barely graduated. They are actors who have never forgotten their theatrical roots and who, perhaps for this reason, display a virtuosic versatility in their work, with movie performances ranging from serious roles to outrageous popcorn villains.

Rush’s over-the-top swashbuckling as Captain Barbossa in the box-office smash Pirates of the Caribbean guaranteed his hero status to a generation of 10-year-old boys. But what made his international reputation were his portrayals of sensitive, disturbed men on the brink of sanity: his Peter Sellers in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, the marquis de Sade in Quills (which garnered him an Oscar nomination) and his Oscar-winning role as pianist David Helfgott in Shine.

These roles demonstrate Rush’s meticulous attention to detail, a clue to his versatility and the kinds of depth he can bring even to a part such as Barbossa, surely one of the most charismatic villains on the contemporary screen. For the role of Helfgott, for example, he befriended the pianist and closely studied his speech and mannerisms for years.

Rush brings to these roles a lot more than virtuosic skill, although he has plenty of that. He suffered a breakdown in 1992 from overwork and anxieties over his career, and there’s little doubt this experience feeds into the emotional complexities of the characters he creates. International fame came late. Until he won the 1996 best actor Oscar for his role in Shine, prompting an avalanche of praised film roles, Rush was simply one of the best stage actors in Australia.

Geoffrey Rush as King Berenger in Exit the King

It is this background that generates the richness of his screen roles. He was born in 1951 in Toowoomba, Queensland, and took an arts degree at The University of Queensland. He was talent-spotted in a university revue by the Queensland Theatre Company, where he began his theatre career. He made his debut in 1971 in a QTC production of Wrong Side of the Moon. He worked with the company for four years, appearing in roles ranging across classical plays to pantomime, from Juno and the Paycock to Hamlet on Ice.

After that he followed a trail trod by many Australian actors and travelled to Paris, where he studied with famed acting teacher Jacques Le Coq for two years, developing his clowning and mime skills. When Rush returned to Australia he began his theatre career in earnest, becoming one of the leading figures in Australian theatre on and off the stage.

In the following years he starred in a variety of plays, most famously with Mel Gibson in Waiting for Godot. In 1981 he joined Jim Sharman’s Lighthouse troupe, an ensemble of outstanding actors that premiered radical interpretations of classics and new works by Patrick White, Louis Nowra and Stephen Sewell.

When the Lighthouse foundered, he was one of the syndicate members who bought the Belvoir St Theatre, then fallen on hard times with the folding of the Nimrod, and was, with Neil Armfield, one of the founding members of Company B. In the mid-80s he also directed Adelaide’s Magpie Theatre for Young People, where he directed and starred in the hit play The Small Poppies.

Rush played a brilliant John Worthing in Simon Phillips’s celebrated 1988 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, in which he co-starred with his new wife, Menelaus. The play was effectively their honeymoon and, as he famously said, he got to propose to his wife each night and was paid for it.

Rush’s collaboration with Armfield, which culminated in his award-winning performance as King Berenger in Exit the King, has produced some of his most lauded stage roles. Memorable among many remarkable performances are his roles in productions of works by Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. In Armfield’s 1989 production of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, Rush played the downtrodden and comically deluded clerk Poprishchin. Rush’s entrance on stage in an improbably high red wig was one of the great moments in Australian theatre. Armfield and Rush followed up with a carnivalesque production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector.

Geoffrey Rush at the renaming of the Cement Box Theatre foyer in his honour in 2005

It’s easy to see how this collaboration, which demonstrated that Rush is one of the greatest theatre clowns working today, led to his Tony-award winning performance as King Berenger in Armfield’s production of Exit the King. A co-production between Company B and Malthouse Theatre, the show began life in the workshops of the Malthouse in Melbourne, with a new translation nutted out by Armfield and Rush. It received rave reviews in its Melbourne and Sydney seasons, but Ionesco’s existential comedy seems an unlikely Broadway hit. The central theme is, after all, death.

However, Rush’s role as the egocentric 400-year-old king who refuses to die exploits his considerable capacities as a clown and, just as crucially, his ability to explore the darker regions of the human psyche. The final 10 minutes of Exit the King, in which Berenger’s world gradually vanishes around him as he enters the final kingdom of death, is some of the most powerful theatre I’ve seen. It’s the kind that makes you hold your breath with a joy that’s like anguish.

Anyone who has seen Rush on stage will know he is first of all an animal of the theatre, at his best at play in his natural habitat. And the Tony, the final jewel in Rush’s crown, is perhaps the award that most justly reflects his talent.

By Alison Croggon. Article reproduced courtesy The Australian

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