dweediecat

Geoffrey Rush - Home for Festival Launch ... and Cake

Article from: Herald Sun

by Alice Coster  July 08, 2009
www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25748864-2902,00.html

TONY AWARD WINNER Geoffrey Rush had his cake and ate it too when he celebrated his 58th birthday at the Melbourne International Film Festival program launch.

The Oscar-winning actor recently returned to his home town and said he was happy to be back in Melbourne.

But before he could rush off on Monday night to a birthday party, at a secret North Fitzroy location organised by wife Jane Menelaus, the Exit the King Broadway actor was given another surprise.

Festival director Richard Moore stopped mid-speech during the opening procedures to lead a 700-strong crowd to sing Happy Birthday to Rush, the festival patron.

"It has just been brought to my attention it is Geoffrey Rush's birthday, so lead me in a song of Happy Birthday," Moore said.

Rush smiled and waved shyly before dashing off.

The article had no piccies, so I added me own!

lfuller711

As You Like It

By Peter Craven

Created 2007-04-04 10:00

SubTitle: 

An interview with Geoffrey Rush

Introduction: 

It's a long time now since theatre-goers in this country first became aware that Geoffrey Rush was a major actor. There was the spidery intensity of his role in Diary of a Madman and his very different Astrov in Uncle Vanya. This was an Australian actor who could leap from a play by Stephen Sewell to The Importance of Being Earnest, as if each revealed unfathomable aspects of his nature.

He isn't a pretty actor. He doesn't have eyes that stare at sunsets and make you think of bush heroes, or Shakespearean ones, like Mel Gibson or Heath Ledger. He would be a character actor, except that his plainness or snakiness gleams like a revelation and he makes his characters glitter more mesmerisingly than a pack of stars. That was what happened when he caught everyone's attention, at the most starry forum in the world, with that stammering knockout of a performance in Shine. And when Gibson gave Rush the Oscar, he said, "I always knew you had it in you." If sheer histrionic authority is what gets called greatness in an actor, no one doubted that Geoffrey Rush had it in him.

TM Body Text: 

Geoffrey Rush's last appearance on an Australian stage was in 2002, with Life x 3, in which he and his wife, Jane Menelaus, transfigured the production and made it dance through a great whirligig of typologies. Well, he is back on stage again with a new production, by his friend Neil Armfield, of that classic work of high absurdism, Ionesco's Exit the King, written in the early 1960s, the Doctor Strangelove period when the stage could be crazy because the world knew all about missile crises and endgames.

Rush has been rehearsing and he has the air of a man who is striking but who is oblivious to anything striking about himself. In the dozen years since he won the Academy Award, he has always looked like the most unassuming workaday actor. It was the all-but-invisible Alec Guinness who influenced Rush in his decision to make this play the occasion for his return to the stage. Guinness, who looked ordinary but could play a whole tribe in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Fagin in Oliver Twist or the mad colonel in Bridge on the River Kwai. Guinness, who wasn't renowned for his Hamlet but for his Osric, not his Lear but his Fool.

dweediecat

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Geoffrey Rush wants to link Broadway, Australia

Tony Award winner Geoffrey Rush wants to return to Broadway in the next couple of years — with another production from his native Australia.

 ”I’m trying to find something because I definitely want to come back here in the next couple of years,” Rush told reporters backstage after winning the best actor in a play Tony Award on Sunday for his Broadway debut in “Exit The King.”

He wants to create a link between Australian theaters and Broadway similar to the “pathway” he said exists between top London theaters and Broadway, which helps some British productions find their way to New York’s Great White Way.

“I’d love to try and now help establish even a stronger bond for some of the great original work that’s coming out of Australian theaters,” said Oscar winner Rush.

“Billy Elliot The Musical,” which won 10 Tony Awards including best musical, and “The Norman Conquests,” which won best revival of a play, both came to Broadway from London.

A veteran theater actor in Australia, Rush received rave reviews for his Broadway debut in “Exit The King,” which he and the play’s director Neil Armfield adapted from Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 play. The production, which played in Australia in 2007, finishes its three-month Broadway run on Sunday.

“I’m a very slow learner,” Rush, 57, joked of his late Broadway debut. “It took me into my 40s to find the right time to be in film.” 

“People have offered me roles before and I didn’t really feel like plunging into being a guest on four-week rehearsal period on some kind of classic,” he said. “I wanted to bring something out of our theatrical soil that we’d already tested.”

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Genius.  Love Love Love  Go, Geoffrey, Go!

Brilliant.  Neil Armfield has already strategically transplanted himself here (US)...  he's biding his time in Canada first... 

*dweediecat squees, cartwheels, and is sent to hospital *