Geoffrey Rush is at his best playing the wicked or mentally disturbed. And he's making no exception to the rule in his latest role as the late British comedian and actor Peter Sellers. Repressed, unkind, insensitive, Sellers is another Rush monster. The Australian actor talks to Donald Clarke about tapping into his inner demons
'Oh, there is something a bit creepy about that man," an actress friend said when I mentioned I was about to meet Geoffrey Rush. "I mean he's good, but. . . Eugh! There's just something." It had never really occurred to me before, but the 53-year-old Australian actor does have a rather unsettling screen presence. In all his best roles - as the barking Marquis de Sade in Quills, as the evil Walsingham in Elizabeth, as the confused David Helfgott in Shine - he has played men with badly-wired psyches. Indeed, it is hard to think of a single Rush performance in which he has not been wicked, mentally disturbed or a bit of both. The hapless antihero of The Tailor of Panama? Maybe. Leon Trotsky in Frida? Just about.
He is at it again in Stephen Hopkins's extraordinary The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a wildly imaginative biopic, which, despite being commissioned as a TV movie for the cable network HBO, utterly transcends a genre which has previously brought us Sherilyn Fenn as Elizabeth Taylor (hilarious) and Jennifer Love Hewitt as Audrey Hepburn (too dull even to be funny). Drawing heavily on Roger Lewis's exhaustive biography, the film paints a picture of an actor whose various comic personae gradually come to overwhelm what little personality he ever had. Repressed, unkind, insensitive, this Sellers is another Rush monster.
"People say I play a lot of psychiatrically eccentric people," he says. "But there are really just three - David Helfgott, the Marquis de Sade and, possibly, Sellers. But, more importantly, they are all artists: a musician, a writer and an actor. I do also tend to play roles where I mentor beautiful young women. I don't know why that is. But, yes, when I look at the Shakespearean repertoire, I discover I rarely ever played the kings or the princes or the lovers."
And he doesn't mind that? "No, not at all. That is what I like doing. I played Lear's fool. I played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. I was always in that outer concentric circle of acting roles: the sleazeballs, the con artists, the drunks, the losers. I see those marginalised characters as being my lot."
I am happy to relate that Rush seems reasonably normal in the flesh. Articulate and expansive, his conversational style combines Aussie bluster ("Alright Donald. How you doing mate?") with a slight undercurrent of luvviness (repertoire is pronounced "rapahrtwahre").
Born in Brisbane in 1951, Rush began dabbling in theatre while studying at the University of Queensland. In 1971, after turning heads in a student revue, he was invited to join the Queensland Theatre Company and embarked on a career which, though always busy, would not deliver real fame for a further two decades.
It must have been difficult to watch his old friend Mel Gibson - the two young thesps shared a flat while appearing together in, if you can believe this, Waiting for Godot - become an international celebrity as he chugged along doing decent work for little reward.
"I worked with Jim Sharman, the man who directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show and so forth, in Adelaide for a while. He always said: 'Your best period will be in your forties. All this stuff is just groundwork. It will all happen when you are in your forties.' And he was right. Even when I was 23 I was - like Sellers - putting a lot of white shoe polish in my hair and aging up. Like Sellers, I really am a character man."
Leafing through profiles of Rush, the temptation to see parallels with Sellers's career is hard to resist. What's this? In the early 1990s it seems that Rush had something of a nervous breakdown. Was he troubled by the same demons that assailed Sellers? Did the pressure to become somebody different every evening eventually make it hard to just be himself? "No, thankfully, it never got messy in that way. I think it was really just the sort of thing that a great deal of men go through at that stage of their lives." This may be so, but Rush's breakdown did seem to have some connection with the demands that come with being an actor.
"I was working very hard and I got married and had children," he says. "Life was shifting in a number of serious ways. Everyone tried to define it as stage fright. But, no, your body goes uncontrollably into a state of dread. It is just adrenalin glands going: wham! The main symptom was just freezing in the middle of a performance. A friend of mine described it as that existential moment an actor has where he suddenly sees the exit light at the back of the theatre and thinks: I'd like to go through that. But I just changed my lifestyle - drank a bit less, fewer late nights, some meditation - and I sorted it."
Rush acknowledges that playing the troubled pianist David Helfgott in Scott Hicks's 1996 film Shine helped in the rehabilitation process. He won an Academy Award for the part and, at the age of 44, saw doors open in Hollywood. It seems obvious now that he would go on to become a leading character actor, but many previous Oscar-winners have failed to capitalise on their awards.
"After Shine I wasn't really sure what film map I was supposed to follow," he says. "By some strange stroke of fate, Bille August decided that I should play Javert in Les Misérables long before Shine had been released. And then came Elizabeth. And then Shakespeare in Love came up. So suddenly I found myself in tights yet again. I thought I had better do something else." What he did was the underrated super-hero comedy Mystery Men and then the broad horror film The House on Haunted Hill. Like all the best character actors, he has proved adept at slipping from highbrow projects to mainstream trash while retaining his dignity.
Such is Rush's reputation now that director Stephen Hopkins, previously known for such undistinguished projects as The Ghost and The Darkness and Lost in Space, felt that The Life and Death of Peter Sellers would be impossible without his participation. The script by Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus allows Sellers to inhabit the various characters who shape his life. So, for example, after the actor's first wife, played by Emily Watson, finally casts him out after enduring one too many tantrums, Rush turns up wearing her clothes and a wig to re-imagine a happier conclusion to their confrontation. Elsewhere, he takes on the personae of his domineering mother (Miriam Margolyes), Stanley Kubrick (Stanley Tucci), who directed him in Dr Strangelove, and his sad father Bill Sellers (Peter Vaughan).
"Some people find the idea of the Sellers character playing various people in the film weird or disconcerting," Rush says. "I always found it terrific. The movie is about multiple personality disorders on both an artistic and psychological level. The fact that Sellers gets to articulate what he was thinking through the minds and personalities of the people who were close to him is very important." But this requires some punishingly complicated acts of impersonation on Rush's part. Take his portrayal of Stanley Kubrick. He's not really doing Kubrick at all. He's not even doing Tucci doing Kubrick.
"Yes, it's Geoffrey Rush playing Peter Sellers playing Stanley Tucci playing a version of Kubrick," he laughs. "It's not quite as clinical as that, but that's basically it. There wasn't a great deal to work with, as Stanley was only on set for a couple of days. I said to the editor just bang me out a DVD of Stanley's scenes so I can look at them in the make-up chair. I didn't look at any real footage of Stanley Kubrick, because that would be kind of irrelevant." Sadly, the scenes where Sellers takes on the character of the preposterous mystic Maurice Woodruff, played hilariously by Stephen Fry, have been cut from the finished film.
"Stephen Fry gave me a very wide berth: 'I can't be here when you do it. Just do me and piss off.' Whereas Miriam Margolyes came in and directed me through the whole scene. As for Emily Watson, well, I was never going to look like this beautiful Chekhovian actress. So I look a bit like a blonde with a bad hangover."
As you may have gathered, absolutely everybody is in the film. Steve Pemberton of the League of Gentlemen plays Sellers's fellow Goon Harry Secombe. Nigel Havers (don't blink) turns up as David Niven. John Lithgow is excellent as Pink Panther director Blake Edwards. And Charlize Theron confirms that her performance in Monster was no fluke with a blistering turn as Sellers's second wife Britt Ekland (the real Britt was originally outraged at the casting, but was won over when Charlize invited her to a triumphant screening at Cannes).
The vividness of the lives around Sellers contrasts markedly with the stark emptiness within the actor. The film buzzes with colour and is juiced up by thrilling fantasy sequences, but remains a sombre tale of a man in search of (or perhaps in flight from) his own personality. I wonder if Rush's view of Sellers changed during the making of the film. Did he get any closer to understanding why Sellers behaved quite so badly towards those he loved?
"Well, he had a very rootless upbringing," he says. "And he had all this resentment and anger that stemmed from his relationship with his mother, Peg, though they had a playful relationship too. And there is something that the film doesn't touch on that helps explains that relationship. She had a stillborn baby a year before he was born. Actually, Peter's name was really Richard Sellers, but Peg kept calling him Peter, which was the dead baby's name. I find that a fascinating justification for where she was coming from."
Rush has clearly studied his subject in considerable depth and has much of interest to say about how Sellers's various performances evolved. He can trace the origins of Dr Strangelove back to the music-hall comics Sellers grew up on. He has things to say about the way that the budding comic was never properly disciplined as a child. But he feels research has its limits. "I am not approaching the character from a psychological point of view, because that way madness lies. You end up treating the character like a butterfly specimen."
Sadly, as the film will screen on HBO before any US theatrical release, Rush will be ineligible for an Oscar nomination. He seems unconcerned; not least, one suspects, because he has had other more important things on his mind recently. In the middle of filming The Life and Death of Peter Sellers Rush discovered awful news concerning his wife, the actor Jane Menelaus.
"Well, what happened was I said to Stephen: I am going to get some news tomorrow which will be either not good or not very good at all. So it transpired that Jane had breast cancer and had to have surgery. Stephen, bless him, said you have to go home. We will just shut everything down. So I had 12 days off two weeks before the end of the shoot and then came back and finished it. But she has been through what 12,000 other Australian women went through that same year and she is fine now."
How on earth does an actor get himself back into the right sort of mindset while shouldering those sorts of worries? "Oh look, it happens. It is not unique to people in our profession. If you worked in an office you have to get back in there and do it as well. At least I was able to take a year off afterwards. I was lucky. But there is nothing special about actors."
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers opens next Friday
