Geoffrey Rush: Gold Rush

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/10/04/geoffrey-rush-gold-rush/

Geoffrey Rush came out of nowhere with an Oscar win for Shine. After winning for Best Actor, Rush seemed destined to play supporting roles like the one which earned him his second nomination in Shakespeare in Love. At the time of this profile from the March 2001 issue of Movieline magazine, Rush was once again nominated for Best Actor (this time for Quills) and was appearing opposite Pierce Brosnan in the thriller, The Tailor of Panama.

For the third time in five years, the name Geoffrey Rush and the word Oscar have been mentioned in the same sentence. Which is why this gangly, tousle-haired, 49-year-old Australian actor is, once again, sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel room, chain-smoking, sipping coffee and talking about playing the role of a tortured artistic genius. The last time Rush struck this pose, the tortured genius was the piano-playing David Helfgott, and the movie was Shine. At the Oscar ceremony, Susan Sarandon opened the Best Actor envelope and Rush (unknown outside Australia and tottering on the brink of middle age) walked off with the statuette, leaving Ralph Fiennes and Tom Cruise in his wake.

“How did you spend that night?”

“In an alcoholic haze. I remember running into Elton John and Muhammad Ali. I also remember not letting go of that little gold man.”

When Rush and his little gold man returned Down Under, he was offered every Australian film that was going into production. Not bad for a guy who, even in his native country, was considered primarily a stage actor and, until Shine, had never been offered a major film role. Bigger international players also rang him up, which resulted in Rush appearing in three high-profile films in 1998. He heard from director Bille August, who offered him the role of Inspector Javert in Columbia’s big-budget version of Les Miserables. Shekhar Kapur invited him to play the quiet, controlled adviser who helps a vulnerable queen sidestep her way through scoundrels and backstabbers in Gramercy’s Elizabeth. John Madden cast him as the miserly theater owner in Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love, which led to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

After a couple of poor choices, like the horrorfest House on Haunted Hill, Rush was given another lip-smacking offer, the role of the Marquis de Sade in Quills, which tells the tale of the final two years of Sade’s incarceration for writing about sodomy, necrophilia, unusual things you can do with church wafers and other blasphemous topics that reddened the neck veins of Napoleon. Quills is a rollicking mixture of horror, humor, piety, carnality, repression and liberation. Rush’s performance as the aged, irrepressible and oft-times nude Marquis in Philip Kaufman’s film is so wicked and so thrillingly theatrical that it puts the lie to the notion that movies about writers are dull.

“How did you and Kaufman hook up on this? Did you know him?” I ask.

“No. In fact, when my agent called and said that Phil wanted to meet with me, I said, ‘What’s he done?'”

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Right Stuff…”

“‘Oh, that Phil Kaufman,’ I said. Well, that raised my interest. If you’re doing the Marquis de Sade, you don’t want to be in the hands of a hack.” Rush takes a drag on his cigarette and adds, “Well, maybe you do. A little Russ Meyer, a little John Waters playfulness, but I think Phil’s done that as well.”

“Were you familiar with the Marquis?”

“Yeah. I had done Marat/Sade onstage, and when I was at university in the late ’60s, Sade was a counterculture icon. When I read Doug Wright’s script, I said, ‘Wow.’ The dialogue was so lurid and funny. Still, I thought I was wrong for the part, because in the script Sade is in his 70s and weighs over 300 pounds. The age and weight differential didn’t seem to bother Kaufman.”

Rush got on well with Kaufman, but the thing that pushed him to commit was hearing that Kate Winslet was interested in playing the literate laundress who trades kisses for pages, which she then smuggles out of the prison. “Kate’s one of those rare creatures who is not afraid of making daring choices,” says Rush. “She’s created some of the most memorable, classically sculpted performances of her generation. And she’s also a movie star. I heard that she’d do it if I did it, and I was honored and flattered by that notion. I responded by saying I’d do it if she did it, and four months later Kate and I and Joaquin Phoenix were shooting in England.”

Rush was also aware of Phoenix’s abilities, having first picked up on him in the black comedy To Die For, and supported Kaufman’s choice to cast him as the priest who tries to redeem the Marquis. “Joaquin has that magical film quality where deep in his eyes, he tells what’s not being said,” says Rush. “That quality becomes mesmerizing on-screen. Working with him reminded me of working with Noah Taylor on Shine.