Must-see films are few and far between. However, Elizabeth - which goes on general release next Friday - is one of them. Like La Reine Margot a few years back, it strips away the accumulated varnish of 400 years of reverential myth-making and reveals the Elizabethan world as a place of terror, brutality and betrayal. A dark Darwinian stew where survival - at whatever cost - is all.
The shadow to Cate Blanchett's luminous Elizabeth is Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham, queen-maker, spy-master, a man - in this version of history as willing to dip his hands in blood as in water. In an industry not known for its ability to see beyond the last performance, Rush's sinister, controlling Walsingham - complete with hints of latent homosexuality - is as far from his Oscar-winning portrayal of the manic-pianist David Helfgott in Shine as could be imagined. Yet Rush very nearly turned it down. "Although I loved the texture and the atmosphere of the script and the broad picture of it, I thought `Oh there's a particular kind of English classical actor that's probably better for this than I am'. Maybe I was thinking of a slightly more dated or less fashionable era of film-making."
It was an understandable concern. Growing up in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, he had been subjected to the usual diet of BBC imports. ("Glenda et al and the Sunday night Dickens.") Like his co-star Cate Blanchett, Rush belongs to that elite group of Australian actors who came up not through the Neighbours/Home And Away school of teledrama but through classical theatre. Geoffrey Rush was born in 1951 in Brisbane into an ordinary family with no theatrical connections or aspirations. His father was an accountant. He first became aware of the potential of theatre at university where he did an arts degree. "That was a particularly hot period. There was no other professional company and just for various political and social reasons the campus was where things were really sort of centred." His first job as a professional saw him spend a formative two years with the then newly-founded Queensland Theatre Company (QTC). One of his mentors there was Joe McCallum - ex-Abbey - who, in the 1960s had been a tutor at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney.
"We had this pretty wild 62-year-old bohemian Irishman and this rather conservative RADA-graduate RAF-type English director. They were yin and yang, but it was a fantastic combination and Joe would do passionate, frightening, challenging productions of Juno and the Paycock and Alan would do rather nice, tied-up-with-a-pink-bow-at-the-end productions of Arthur Wing Pinero's The Schoolmistress."
To firm up his technique, Rush spent the next two years in Paris at the Jacques Lecoq School of Mime, Movement and Theatre. He returned to the QTC "to fulfil a bit of an economic bond with the company" playing the Fool to Warren Mitchell's Lear and performing in Waiting for Godot with Mel Gibson.
"I was the first time that I said to myself that I think I have something distinctive to offer. I knew I was on some sort of personal road of discovery, and I wanted to be involved in the classics, in the big stories. And I knew that I was finding some kind of idiom that was distinctly but not self-consciously Australian that somehow worked for me and for the audience and the environment in which I was performing that was leading us away from a lot of the borrowed conventions of the English theatre, which had pretty much dominated the generation before. It's finding a language in the theatre, it's what lives and is stimulating and is sharp and intelligent, and you know it when it happens. And it doesn't mean doing King Lear with corks on your hats or Nabucco in thongs."
And Rush believes that in Elizabeth, Indian director Shekhar Kapur has also found a new way of approaching the thus-far heritage-shackled world of screen costume drama. To convince Rush to take on the pivotal role of Walsingham, Kapur had flown to Prague where Rush was then filming Les Miserables. "I think literally by dessert I'd agreed to be in it. It was Shekhar himself. We spoke about his life in Bombay, and that really intrigued me. Because I thought this guy has probably got a better feeling for what my reading has told me about life in London in Tudor times. The anarchy and the melee - the stew - is not what we get from contemporary English life, and it probably takes an outsider to re-find that spark, or to be outside enough to want to look for that angle."
And Rush cites Czech director Milos Forman's first American films Taking Off and Hair. "He was able to take a hippie Broadway musical and turn it into a great analysis of American class, and I don't think an American director could ever have done that. It's just looking through a different window and seeing quite different vistas."
However, Rush does not believe Kapur's casting of two Australians at the centre of the movie was anything other than chance. "There was no theory behind it. I think he'd looked at every 25- to 27-year-old actress on the planet, as you do if you're casting the role of Elizabeth. And I think he saw a show reel of Oscar and Lucinda and just went, `she's got a quality that I'm after. Oh. Where's she from? Oh Australia. OK'. "
Unlike his director, Geoffrey Rush was well versed in the history of the period, through his research into Shakespeare and Jacobean playwrights. "The shift from Elizabeth to James I is a really interesting cultural phenomenon, and when you're looking at the plays that are written in that period, you realise that her reign really goes deep back into that 16th century."
Shekhar Kapur's rather more left-field approach only whetted Rush's appetite. "He said `I see Walsingham very much as Krishna'. And I thought, `He's out of his tree'. But he was completely right. Because he was hinting at the long-term qualities of the guru disciple relationship where questions are asked that don't have answers, but answers may be found. And I thought, `You're not going to get that from an English director'. Most people on the surface saw Walsingham as a very Machiavellian figure but he said he wanted the character to be a very compassionate person. Whether that's how you perceive him I don't know, but there's compassion in what Walsingham does. Now whether it's ended up like that is another story."
Geoffrey Rush is a measured, articulate and highly intelligent man. He takes nothing for granted. As spontaneous and emotional as the finished performance might appear, everything is backed up with hard-nosed logic. Unlike his research for Shine, for which Rush spent hours studying audio and video tapes of his character David Helfgott, his research for Walsingham was mitigated by "the big picture". It's horses for courses, he says.
"I thought, this is going to be one of those cinematic experiences where you feel as though you have been on the great wheel of life and tiny domestic details of your laundry bills and reasons for doing things were not going to be that relevant. It was like a chess game. We are going to watch a very vibrant and reverberative chess game, and the pieces and the players have got to be very clearly defined as to what sort of moves they're capable of making. In the screenplay we looked very much at how the four principle men influenced this young woman and buffered her through this extraordinary kind of monarchical rite of passage, and Walsingham seemed to be the one who didn't come with a very rigidly prescribed agenda."
Since Rush's 1995 Oscar for Shine he has not stopped working: Les Miserables, Elizabeth, most recently Shakespeare in Love, after which it was back to Brisbane, his young family and his first love the theatre, with Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro. Yet although over recent years Rush has taken just about every Australian theatre award going, he knows that winning an Oscar so early in his film career carries terrible dangers. But he is determined it will not prove - as it has with others - a poisoned chalice.
"You have to be aware of that and acknowledge it. And it's a burden. But I know that carrying any sort of burden as an actor doesn't really get you anywhere and you have to say `Well I'll let that go now, because if I live with that notion then the next 30 years when I hope to be working in my dotage, it will all be anti-climactic'. I have to believe in my head that there's still something wonderful and satisfying around the corner."
Elizabeth is being shown tomorrow as the final screening of the Cork Film festival and goes on general release on Friday.