Geoffrey Rush

Geoffrey Rush: the only Australian actor to win a Tony, a Primetime Emmy and an Oscar, is our Rosebud guest today. Geoffrey tells Gyles about his childhood growing up in Toowoomba, Queensland, the son of a broken marriage, brought up by his mum and grandparents. He talks about his early memories of rural Australia - of gardens, flower festivals and fireworks - and then he tells Gyles about moving to Brisbane, and discovering his talent for performance. He talks about his work with the Queensland Theatre Company, about meeting his wife, Jane, about Shakespeare and training with Lecoq in Paris. He then tells Gyles about his big break in the Oscar-winning Shine, about winning the Oscar, and about Shakespeare in Love. He discusses his case against the Sydney Daily Telegraph, from whom he won damages in 2020. Our heartfelt thanks to Geoffrey Rush for this fascinating conversation. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoZLtkZi4v5b2WzerOf0ACA. Join The Rosebud Family here https://open.acast.com/networks/682f0de710ca442d5f244250/shows/6835e960944c948b9a623f10/episodes/www.patreon.com/rosebud. And visit our website here https://www.rosebudpodcast.co.uk/. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 1:01Speaker 01

  Roses are red, vandits are blue. I'm feeling mellow, how about you? Cue the music, it's Rosebud.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Hello, I'm Gyles Brandreth and this is another episode of Rosebud. It's an actor again as my guest today. And he's a unique actor, unique in the fact that he's won the Triple Crown. He's an Oscar-winning actor. He's also won an Emmy, a primetime Emmy for television work, and a Tony Award for an appearance on Broadway. He's a wonderful actor. I first saw him in a film called Shine many years ago. Lots of people saw him playing Sir Francis Walsingham in the film Elizabeth. He then played Philip Henslow in that wonderful Shakespeare in Love. The Marquis de Sade in Quills. I think his wife was in that too, playing the Marquis de Sade's wife.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I think he told me once that he and his wife, when they went out to dinner, they were invited as the de Sades. I loved him, of course, in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Maybe he's best known in this country, perhaps for being in The King's Speech, playing the speech therapist Lionel Logue. One of his films that I've seen several times is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, in which he was fascinating. Peter Sellers, a complicated, multifaceted individual. And I think this actor you're going to meet today is a complicated, multifaceted fellow. You will by now, I hope, have guessed that the actor I'm referring to is Geoffrey Rush. Our conversation, well, it begins with his Australian roots,

• 3:00Speaker 01

  his childhood with parents who separated when he was quite young. He came to Europe for the first time to go to Paris. And then he had his breakup moments, being in Shine, meeting his wife Jane. And then more recently, what he described to me as seven years of banishment. He'll touch on that as well in the course of our conversation. So an unusual life, a remarkable life, with some highs and some deep lows. This is a very special episode of Rosebud with a most distinguished Australian actor, Geoffrey Rush. Cue the music.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Geoffrey Rush, born, if I've got this right, on the 6th of July, 1951?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  So far, so good?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, all good.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  I need to ask you, Geoffrey, what is your very first memory?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I've got a fairly visceral and vivid recall of a lot of my childhood for different reasons. I can detail the time down to probably 1954, maybe late 1953. So I was three-ish. Because it was, I had two minor hernia ops, my mum told me. So I don't have any recall, but just of that anecdote being something from my childhood. But I do remember, you know, in the early 50s, probably like Britain, everyone around that age had their tonsils whipped out.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  You kind of got lured into it by being told you'd eat ice cream for a week, which is what they did. And I remember going from the bed in the hospital, very clearly, through a screen door that slammed a little bit like the door on my grandparents' farm in Toowoomba on the Darling Downs. And they brought what looked like a mesh sieve from the kitchen, but it was round with the mesh wire, and laid a cloth on it, and they must have sprinkled a bit of chloroform.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  And I remember screaming for about four seconds and going under.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  That's a vivid first memory.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Well, it's starting with a bang, not a whimper.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Now, quite a bit to unpack there. The grandparents, Toowoomba is the place you mentioned?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And your mother.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  The whole set of grandparents.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Okay, give us the whole set of grandparents. Give us this place where you are. Tell us, for people who don't know, that part of Australia.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Toowoomba's now become a little bit more hip because they, you know, 20, 30 years ago, they opened a university and all of that. But it was a kind of, on the Darling Downs, it was the biggest city outside of Brisbane. And the thing I remember most, I left there when I was eight, was it had the most beautiful garden. It was a garden city. And every year, they had the most superb in September, Carnival of Flowers.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  All of the local guilds, the unions, the foundry workers would enter afloat. And to me, my memory of it was seeing these phantasmagorical galleons that were covered in, they were low-lying tractors, I think they used, covered with chicken wire and individually twirled crepe paper flowers. And they would have a giant Botticelli shell and some saucy 17-year-old carnival queen, who would be there with ribbons,

• 7:24Speaker 02

  and six giant tropical fish pulling her as at work. And they glided down Ruthven Street. People probably thought Australia was a bit of a cultural backwater in the 50s. You know, we sort of had some Peter Finch films from around that time, but there was no industry from, it stopped in the 30s and then kind of revitalized in the 70s. So things were a bit sluggish. But I remember he was in a wonderful film called The Shirely.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  This is Peter Finch?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Famous Australian actor, very good-looking. Noted for possibly, was it an affair with, if I imagine this, with Vivienne Leigh?

• 8:13Speaker 02

  That's, yes.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Not imagine that.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  He was picked up by them in 48. They came out and did...

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Laurence Olivier, Vivienne Leigh went to Australia, famous tour, School for Scandal, Oedipus Rex, all of that, Richard III. And they encountered...

• 8:30Speaker 02

  They encountered Peter.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Peter Finch and...

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Took him home.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Took him home.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  And gave him a job.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Gave him a job. And a place to rest his head and the rest of him.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, giddy times, and it made a big impact. It was a thank you to the Anzacs for...

• 8:47Speaker 01

  We are sending you our equivalent of the National Theatre, the old Vic Company, led by the great Sir Laurence Olivier. Vivienne Leigh's star of Gone with the Wind, they're coming to Australia.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  They are.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  So you've given me this wonderfully colourful picture of your recollection of the 1950s Australia. Flowers, carnival, a taste of theatre brought to you from the glamour of the West End. Now, give me who these grandparents of yours are, the two sets.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Okay, my paternal grandparents were from...

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Ireland and the other side, my uh maternal grandparents were from Germany. And I investigated that because I went on, who do you think you are? And it went back to John Charles Rush seventeen ninety dash ninety five question mark. He came out uh in the famine in the eighteen forties to Australia and became a farmer. That was the mythology that we'd all grown up with. Uh but of course, when I went on, who do you think you are? No, a convict. He got a seven year for pig jobbing.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Stealing pigs.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  I think he stole pigs and then uh flogged them off for a percentage because they'd be, I think the the pig sales would move all around Ireland. And the locals, you'd kind of do a bit like the Palio in Italy. You do, you just trade cash and money. Uh and he got caught doing that.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  So on your father's side, you're descended from convict.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And your father was who? What was his name, your dad?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Uh Roy.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Who was he? What did you do for a living? What was he like?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Uh, he was a bit of a lone wolf. Uh, he, he, the descendant of the Irish convict. He uh, I think he wanted to be, he, he, he was an alcoholic at a very young age.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Your father?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  And why was he an alcoholic?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I think it was a conflict with his dad, who wanted him to be on the land. And I think Roy wanted to run a, a neat little sports shop. He was, he was close to being on the Queensland soccer team. One of my early memories is uh him and my mum being there on a Saturday afternoon in the front of one of those fifties cars that didn't really have a backseat. Terrible curve at the front, you know, whatever the seat was. Mum would be banging around the horn going, come on, Roy, you know? And then he kind of pretty much at that point disappeared

• 11:49Speaker 02

  from my life.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Age of four.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember waiting up for him to come back. He'd gone to join the Air Force as an accountant. And that was probably a way of getting himself together, I think. He, so he became a kind of uh a distant uncle figure to me. But I got, the, the women on both sides of my family, the grandmothers, were huge in my childhood life. Almost like a, probably gave me a little bit of a split personality because on Roy's side, they were more middle class. And on my mum's side, they were hardworking people of the land.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  So we have Roy, whose father wanted him to be on the land to farm as he had done, who wanted something different, something better for himself as he saw it, who couldn't get that, who drank for consolation, who escaped by joining the Air Force and disappears basically from your life from the age of four. We'll come back to him a little bit later. Your mother is who? What is her name and who are her parents?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  My mum is Merle.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Merle?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  As in Oberon?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  She, yeah, she was Merle Bischoff. So there was uh the ancestry of that side of the family. And I knew my great grandmother, when I was a teenager, we were living, we moved to Brisbane when I was eight, probably for economic reasons, to live in with my mum's parents and my uncle. My uncle and I shared a room. We shared the same double bed. It was a little bit, uh was, it was actually the Housing Commission rental office that my grandfather.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  So your mother's brother and you shared a room when you were in Brisbane?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Families with my sister, Roseanne and I, were both taking very good care of us as children of a single mum. In the fifties was pretty tough going, I think. There were no government support schemes or anything like that.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  And possibly in nineteen fifties Australia, a, a single mother might be rather looked down on? Was there?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Possibly, uh, yes.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Social stigma attached to it?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  It ended up being a divorce. Uh, her side of the, my mum's side of the family were Lutherans and the other side were Presbyterians. So they were both kind of, for the modesty and propriety of that image, it, they were breakaway groups back in the day, you know what I mean?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  And how would you describe your mother? Picture, give us a picture of what she looked like, her manner?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  In one word, she was a jiver.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  A jiver?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  She loved to dance.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  And she would, she loved sneaking out as a teenager to go to dances at Cloudland. What a name and what a ballroom. She had two very good friends who were dance partners. They were a gay couple. No one knew that, I mean.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  No one referred to it?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't, no, well, one was called Henry and one was called Les. And they, they were like great buddies to me because Les uh was an, an artist. I think he was a hairdresser by trade. And Henry was a very straight looking man. And he would take Merle dancing as a, a beard, as a front, you know? And they were, I remember we had a Stromberg Carlson gramophone in the front room of a very small cottage in Toowoomba. Uh, you know, I remember so vividly, we'd have cracker night, fireworks, November the fifth, in the middle of the heat of summer.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  They had to ban that eventually. But cracker night was, again, one of the rituals, like the carnival of flowers, where you went, this is the best day of the year. And you'd have flower pots that would, and you'd make a guy and that would be put in there. So he looks like he's pissing and you'd have roman candles coming out of his ears and all that sort of stuff. Uh, and on the gramophone, the boys would be playing Little Richard, Rip It Up. And I just went, these are my people. It was powerful.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  So your life, what were you like as a little boy? Because what you're remembering are the colourful moments.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  What were you like as a little boy, Jeffrey?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Quite shy, I think. But uh because Merle worked, there was a lot of sharing between Merle, my

• 16:51Speaker 02

  uh mum's parents were down in Brisbane by now. So my dad's mum, May, they, they had a farm out on, in, in, in, in the Darling Downs. And I used to spend a lot of holidays with them all the way through, even once I'd moved to Brisbane.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  And you had a sister as well?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  My sister, yeah, Roseanne.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  And older or younger?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Two years older.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Fine, and you were close to her?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Not really as offspring. We did spend a lot of time together. We got close later when I, when I had kids, thirty years later. Um, she was invaluable in my life.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  And your first school?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  It was called South Girls and Infants. So it was a big, beautiful, late high Victorian, probably built in the eighteen eighties, big educational place in Toowoomba. And I remember my grandmother, my father's mother, would pick me up after school. Or I was a latchkey kid. There was a lot of times where I would go home.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Or I'd go round to my grandmother's house because it was quite close to the school. And then she'd walk me home later. And I remember her one day on that walk, teaching me, well, I said, we learnt to polka today at school. We used, it was so Anglo, you know, in a way, there was, they'd play, they'd play the Durham reel. And we'd dance in the schoolyard and do all that sort of stuff, which I loved. But I remember she was going, yeah, that's right, you go right, left, right, right, left, right, left, right, left. So once you've done that, when you're six, it instilled in me a sense of weight transference and balance

• 18:41Speaker 02

  that was just like water off a duck's back. Where some kids were going, I can't now put my weight over. So when I learnt tap dancing later, it was easy. Because you have to go up da, da, da, da, and ba, ba, ba, ba.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  And were you performing at all at that stage?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  No, I was going home as a latchkey kid and in a kind of pathetic way, cutting out little proscenium arches from shoeboxes.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Um, and using the toys that had been left when I had my tonsils removed. There was a little Nelson kind of Ja- James Cook figure with a tricorn some.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  But I used to use them as little figures, so I was very uh, self amusing, um. Uh, and would go, I think, into some kind of weird meditational state. Where I could fill in two or three hours before Mo came home.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  So when did the performing instinct set in? Was it when you moved to Brisbane, your next school?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  No, no, no. More seminal than the Carnival of Flowers annually. And I was able to follow through on this many years later, which was very um, fulfilling for me. Um, there was set up in the thirties, a travelling Variety Vaudeville tent theatre. They would travel and that was the other great event of the year. Certainly, I can remember that for fifty seven, fifty eight, fifty nine. Maybe I saw another one. And I know I saw a Cinderella, uh, Mother Goose and Jack and the Beanstalk, because the tent could hold up to two thousand people. We're talking

• 20:36Speaker 02

  borderline Drury Lane dimensions. And it was on the grass, but it, the tent was fantastic. It had a canvas proscenium arch. All the curtains were Hollandie lines, because there's no fly tower. But they had backdrops. And when Jack climbed the beanstalk, it was a, it was very much the British model of a panto. But we had a heritage in Australia probably since the late nineteenth century, Vaudeville and Variety was huge. Uh, so the, it was an Australian version of that British model.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  And in your head, I mean, you're painting a very clear picture of what your childhood was. Falling in love with this Vaudeville.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Uh, the colour of the flowers, the fireworks and all, I can see that, the loving grandparents. You then go to Brisbane and that must change slightly. You leave the small town to Womban, you're now in Brisbane, you go to a new school?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  This, well, I remember weeping and kissing the boys' school on the side of the building as I left.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Because I loved school and I loved learning uh, the alphabet and letters and words. Terrible at maths. Nothing that worked there for me at all. Um. Being in a new class, uh, I struck gold because Miss Hammond welcomed me with open arms. I was, I think, uh, reserved, but uh, always excited every day to go to school.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  When did you first perform? Did you, at this school?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  We did sketches and she would encourage. I remember I had a colleague there who liked to, we, we, he'd say, I've written a sketch first.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Another boy at school?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, and there was no drama teacher or what, there was no mention of the word improv. But he'd said, I've written, I've written a sketch, it was only about a half a page long, called Doc, uh, Judge Collins' Bad Tooth. And it was about going to the dentist that he was going to play. And he would say to me, I'm going to pull the tooth, the whole tooth.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Nothing but the tooth. And the kids would all go, ah, you're funny. I think we might have even put powder in our hair to look like old men. It was weird. But she was very encouraging of all that. Um. But I remember Mr. Mole in grade six, he'd go, all right, um, tomorrow.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Uh, he used to have a news weather commercial. He'd go, you do the news, you do the weather, Rush, you do the commercial. And then he'd, he'd go home and you'd do an impression of Louis the Fly or something. And the news person would have to look in the newspaper and deliver the thing. The weather would be given. And of course, getting the commercial, you'd just, kids would love it because it was early days of TV, which only arrived in nineteen sixty.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Gosh, TV arrived in Australia in nineteen sixty?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Gosh, so.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Fifty six in Sydney.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  But where you were, Brisbane, nineteen sixty.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  There wasn't a lot going on.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  When did you discover girls? Nineteen sixties? When was your first crush?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  I was at, at primary school, I gather. I like girls and girls like me. And they tended to be the brighter end of the spectrum, maybe at the school. Um, there was one, Joanne McDermott, and another girl called Jill Press. And then I knew them all the way through high school. And then maybe in nineteen ninety eight, I was in Brisbane doing a play, having won the Oscar and everything. And we all had our thirtieth school reunion. And we recreated our photograph.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  What did they think of you? Did they say, we always thought you were like that, Geoffrey?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  They did, did they?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Some did, I think.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  And did you believe them? Were, did you feel when you were a little boy, actually, I am quite special, these girls do like me?

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I didn't, uh.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  But you were at ease with them, weren't you? I think you were being amusing with them. You were being funny and fun.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've, I've always enjoyed female company a lot.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  This is the nineteen sixties in Australia. Well, was there sex, drugs and rock and roll? Was it like swinging London?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Is there a bit of that going on?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  A little bit, yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  And did you get into any of that?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  No, I was still at high school. So really what happened is

• 25:44Speaker 02

  I bombed badly. Uh, I ran the school drama club in year twelve. I went and had a holiday with Roy down on the.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Oh, you were still in touch? This is your father?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And how was he after all these years?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Was he drinking?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  He'd been to Vietnam, uh, and I had.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  With the Australian Air Force?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Well.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  So I think he had a pretty rugged time. But I think he still might have been battling that. Uh, and regrets, I don't know.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Were you easy with him or did he seem like a stranger to you?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Uh, I remember we used to meet up and he'd say, uh, uh, in the, this was in the early sixties, I remember a few times of meeting. He'd go, have you heard Return to Sandy yet? And he'd always, we'd go to visit his brother up in, to Darling Downs in Pittsworth, he had a pharmacy shop there.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Uh, and there was a great jukebox, you know, and he'd feed that and say, what do you think of this song? So we, we liked communicating on those kinds of things.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Welcome to two fifteen Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Love the crown molding.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, one hundred percent fibre internet?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.

• 27:29Speaker 03

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• 27:32Speaker 05

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• 29:08Speaker 01

  In the long run, how do you think coming from a broken home has affected you? Being more unusual in Australia in those days, a father who left when you were four and you only saw occasionally, how do you think it's affected you now in later life?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  I think there was

• 29:28Speaker 02

  a split, a bifurcation, two sets of grandparents that were quite different. And I had, I sort of learnt to operate on different levels. Cause my grandmother, my dad's mother was very musical. She could play the fiddle and the piano and they used to play in homes when I was at university. They were lively, you know.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And the university you went to was the University of Queensland?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Queensland. So I had that Christmas with Roy and he said, I'm going to help you go to university. And I said, that would be really wonderful. And suddenly Keith, his brother, took someone from my high school here and myself and gave us an introduction to the campus. And you went, oh my God, this is really, there are faculties of geology and whatever, you know. And it's quite a notable university now.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  So in the first year, I was very crestfallen and homesick, but I loved those university review life that I'd go and see.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  And I got invited into, through, through the, the guy that had been the director of my school's,

• 30:49Speaker 02

  you know, nondescript theatrical company. He said, there's a group on campus called the College Players. They, they specialise in Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan. And they invited me, he said, he got me an audition. And I went round to this big old grand house in one of the posher suburbs of Brisbane and auditioned for Portia's Man Servant in The Merchant of Venice. And I remember it being very amusing, cause the guy was wonderful and he was directing it. And I said, what do I just read? He said, yes, just call me madam, he went.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  I thought, oh, Irving Berlin, I knew that by then, you know. Anyway, I did that and I went on tour with all these extraordinary people who were in their third or fourth years of degrees, older. So I'm eighteen and they're twenty-two.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And they're touring parts of Australia with this.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  That production is so embedded in my mind, watching them, they were really good. There was no professional theatre company yet. It started in nineteen sixty-nine, the QTC. And it was, it looked as though it would be the director of that company, Brian Neeson, would and should take over, but it was, they imported a wonderful Englishman and an Irishman from the National Institute in Sydney.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Alan Edwards, who he had a sort of.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  This is very intriguing to somebody like me, for whom theatre is embedded in this country for centuries. And what you're now telling me is that the Queensland Theatre Company was basically founded when you were a junior member of it in the nineteen sixties.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  So it's a very new, young thing and you're part of that.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  And it was a repertory company because I did three years there. So it was probably about twenty plays.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  And you realised at once, I'm at home, this is what I've got to do.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  I finished my, well, I had a good time on campus, that we did, we did a production of Frank Väderkin's.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Lulu.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  No, no, the other one.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Something with a flower, there's a flower in the title.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Spring Awakening.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  That's the one.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Uh, no one had done it, not even the Royal Court, but this friend of mine, he said, we're gonna do this play. It's a tough play about masturbation and teenagers and suicide. And I played the head of the, the faculty and I played him as a vulture. I had huge shoulders and got, by now I was getting into nose putty and the Leichner makeup part. And I was pretty good at it.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And the rest is history in a way. Had you been to Europe at that stage?

• 33:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  So you, when you come to Europe the first time, it's about this time, it's after you leave Europe. So you go to the famous, is it Le Coq?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Who in Paris has this movement.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Over the years, we met a number of people who went to train with Le Coq. Was he himself there? It's physical theatre.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  We were, we were absolutely in the right place at the right time.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  And how, why did you think of going to Paris to train with Le Coq?

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Uh, while at university and while at the early days of the Queensland Theatre Company, I did a workshop with an ex-student of Le Coq's. Uh, Mark Furno, his name was. I, I didn't think his clown was particularly interesting. But he said, you have a, in the improvisational exercises, he said, you have a very strong sense of your body and

• 34:34Speaker 02

  you don't illustrate and you don't emphasise and you don't control, you just present, you know. And I, and he said, you should go to this school.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  And what is the essence of what you learnt? In a sentence, what did Le Coq give you?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Make it your very own and you, you learn to discover what that is, that you're not mimicking something else.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  And it was a great, it was a two-year course and the, the culling from year one was from a hundred and twenty people to thirty. So it was, he was very serious about one-on-one

• 35:21Speaker 02

  pedagogical engagement.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  But you were settled in your head that I'm going to be an actor now. I'm going to be my.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what you're gonna do. And you go back to Australia and you become a successful.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  What happened was that in the last year of Le Coq's, Alan Edwards wrote to me and said, how are your finances? He said, I've had a talk to the board. We'll help you with your second year fees. This is in nineteen seventy-six. If you come back and work on contract with the company by, by nineteen eighty.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  And I went nineteen eighty, that's, that's Orwellian.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  And so I took up that offer. And the reason, and then when I graduated, I got a message from him saying, we're going to do a production with Warren Mitchell. And I said, I've met Warren through my best friend at school. His father knew Warren from the, from wartime or something. And I'd seen, and I'd seen Warren do his Alf Garnet one-man show in the clubs in Sydney. And I thought, this guy's a real actor. And then I went and saw him at the ICA in a fantastic Pam James play called Franz Into April, which was about the Fritz Pells, the Gestalt, psych, lunchtime play.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  And I went, this guy's a real actor, you know. And I went and met him in the Nosh Bar opposite the Windmill. And he said, you know, he said, stay here, work with Berkoff, you've just been in Paris, you know. And he said, if you're a bit homesick and you wanna go home, I'm coming out there to do Lear. They wanted me to do The Merchant of Venice. He said, I, I don't wanna play Shylock, I wanna, if I go to the colonies, that's what you could tell he was thinking. I'm giving a Lear. And he was, he was pretty amazing.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  So in your years, before we get to your breakout moment, in your years as a, as an actor in Australia, what for you is the high point? What is the one you think, yeah, I did it? And also what was the low point? What was the worst thing you did in your years as a, an actor touring Australia with the Queensland Theatre Company, before we have you becoming an international star and the best?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Wow. The worst thing was that we did a, we had a, uh, we were nurturing a, a young female director at the Belvoir Theatre. Uh, but we did one production there, uh,

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Les Enfants du Paradis with six people. With a, a smart young Czech woman who it kind of, she couldn't grab that piece. And I'm saying to Jane, I really hope I get hit by a car on my rehearsal today. Because what we're doing is not very good.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  So the big, the big thing, the highlight, Les Enfants du Paradis, very difficult anyway.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  The disaster. The big highlight was doing, because of Les Enfants du Paradis, a wonderful British writer who sadly died only a few years ago, David Holman. He wrote a lot here for T I E. He was a serious Trotskyite in his days. He wrote some extraordinary politicized plays aimed at children. And he came out to work in Australia. And he said, I've written an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman with you in mind, because I know you had such a terrible slump last year doing Les Enfants du Paradis. And he was on a sort of university sabbatical up in Newcastle in New South Wales.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  And I said, hmm, okay, I'd love to do it. And we did it. And Neil said, David, do you mind? Can we improvise around this? I want to get it down to just two actors and two musicians. I don't want three actors, because I don't think it works to have a, a, an externally orbiting figure that's not intrinsic enough.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  We had, we went from a, an initial read through where Neil fell asleep while I was, it's pretty much a monologue, uh, and it kind of, we just unleashed something. We, we, we got Gogol. There's something about Gogol and the breadth of Russia and the size of Australia and the conformity of having this crazy figure who goes, it's a tragic comedy. And when it's funny, it's through the roof funny. And when it's tragic, I mean, the play ends with him in an asylum believing he's King Ferdinand VIII,

• 40:21Speaker 02

  screaming for his mother, riding a troika across Russia to her back to his childhood.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  The keynote that Neil gave, I said, how do I do that? I mean, I don't want to seem bombastic or corny. He said, just make the journey back to my home.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  And I went, okay. Uh, and it had to become, he's, he's just screaming at the end.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Going back to his mother.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Please save me, my mother, from my terrible life.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  God.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  I know. Anyway, we did that. And then twenty odd years later, we took it again. Uh, went to, uh, the Brooklyn Academy with it.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Two breakup moments in your life. One is meeting Jane. Who is Jane? How did you meet her? How has it lasted?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  It's forty years ago we met, twenty second of August, nineteen eighty six. I remember all of that. We didn't get on at all.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no. She, she was from Central here.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Central School of Speech and Drama.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And a, a notable graduate. I mean, but she.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Why didn't you get on? What, what was?

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Uh, I, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. It was a strange, uh, I think, I think she resented my

• 41:43Speaker 02

  popular image in Adelaide or something.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Because you were by then quite well known.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  An ish.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  You've become a leading actor.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, maybe.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And then what changed it? How did the?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  It cha, we just sat and had a drink one night and said, what, why, why are we not getting on? And why, why is there this thing? Because, and it, it just skyrocketed from then. And within eighteen months, we planned marriage. Uh, we joined up with the Melbourne Theatre Company, where she had worked when she came back. She did a lot of television and stuff. She was a really serious classical actress.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And you've been settled ever since, and she's been there.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  We, yeah, and we spent a lot of time together. I mean, we did a lot of Shakespeare together, but she was always, um,

• 42:39Speaker 02

  uh, in Winter's Tale, she was Hermione, Amortolicus. We don't meet, you know. Uh, we did Troilus and Cressida. She's Cressida, I'm Thersites, the clockroach in the Greek army. Uh, and then we did The Importance of Being Earnest together, and she was Gwendolyn and I was Jack.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  And we had our honeymoon on that production touring Australia for four or five months, maybe. And then we revived it late, just only ten years ago, fifteen years ago. And some of the actors had died and we all went up a run.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  And you didn't play slowly, Jack, did you? Well done.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  You gave us your canon Chasuble.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  What did you give us?

• 43:26Speaker 02

  I gave my Bracknell.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Of course you did. Of course you gave your, I, I remember this, because it's one of the things that we have in common. There's a bus stop there of me as Lady Bracknell. That's me as Lady Bracknell. You are the great Australian Lady Bracknell. There's only been one, and it's you. I had forgotten. You went up a run, but down a few lines, because actually it's a shorter part.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  So how do you have your, I mean, you're a serious now classical actor, well known in Australia. How'd you become a movie star? How does that happen?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  That, that, look, it was sort of at a halfway point. I think this year, I, it's a fifty-four year career. There's been a big chunk out since I had a, a, a stoush with a big tabloid newspaper, which lost me a, a bit of time. Uh, but it was a victorious, uh, case, uh, on many levels, but not on all. Um,

• 44:29Speaker 02

  I hit a brick wall, uh, in the early nineties at, when I turned forty, uh, and thought I was treading water and I didn't know, uh,

• 44:46Speaker 02

  I, I always had great stamina and great kind of oomph. And suddenly that went and I got very panicked. And it happened on stage during The Importance of It Being Earnest, on that tour. And I don't know whether it was fatigue or panic about we wanted to start a family. And I thought, I've got no money. You know, I mean, wages in a state theatre company were, you, you didn't accumulate anything. Uh, and it happened during the early part of Lady Bracknell's first entrance and Jack's there. I'm standing behind Jane as Gwendolyn and I said, I feel, I feel, I feel really weird, really, really weird.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  I've got to go off. And I just went off and I was sort of down on all fours in the wings, having a massive panic attack. Um, and then it started recurring and it would be, you know, and you, you met so many more other people who said, I know the feeling. It was one of those things no one really spoke about. And I dealt with that with transcendental meditation and inevitably pharmacological solutions. Xanax was the first thing that was, this will get you back on stage and level you out. And it took a, a, a long period, over about four or five years, but I was determined to keep working.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  And I was finding that, um, I gravitated towards, you know, plays by Beauchamp or plays by Johnson or plays by Ionesco. I thought, don't, don't try and be, you're not the center, you're not the heroic center of anything. You're an orbiting comet, you know.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Now, so take me to this breakout moment. We have the collapse during The Importance of Being Earnest. We have a different range of work. But how do you become a film star?

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Uh, I'd worked in Adelaide a lot and Scott Hicks, who directed Shine, was casting. He'd been working for three or four years, uh, talking to this character called David Elscott and developing a script. And he said to Liz Mulliner, who was a very, one of our great casting agents. She said, no, Jeffrey's the, the person to, to get. And then we started doing it. Uh, the script was a bit complicated at the beginning. They started off with another layer to it where I'm making a trip back to meet up the people who

• 47:31Speaker 02

  helped me get my life back up, because he studied at the Royal College of Music. So I did get to shoot a scene with John Gilgood, which is wonderful.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  And I keep saying to Scott, well, we just celebrated the thirtieth anniversary with a, a festival screening of a four K restoration. It's in pretty good nick and musically it's really crisp. Um, but then I read somewhere, Sir John had said, I don't remember, I remember the Shine experience. It was wonderful. But I don't remember Mr. Rush at all.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  I don't remember Mr. Rush.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Troy's delightful. I don't remember him at all.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  No, he was great. And the thing is, I came home from that phase in London, which was ninety four. Okay. Oh, this film, I should call it shite.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Because I was being atrocious.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Because the film made no sense. It was trying to put another Chinese box on the biographical form. They've, they just edited all that. Scott West pieces said, we're not doing that. Uh, and so we went back to where I started work with Len Redgrave and, and we'd shot the wedding that were in and we just played. And I went, ah, you just be with a camera. You don't really, you know, there was a lot to learn. And after I'd done that, I went and spent six months doing a 12 part television thing because I knew I had to learn a lot more about.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  And then you were nominated for an Oscar quite quickly. Yeah. And then do they make you work to get that Oscar? I mean, was that all ridiculous? Or did you enter into the spirit of that?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Well, no, there was a vibe at the time. It was a year where Secrets and Lies, Mike Lee, English Patient, there was no studio films. It was all in, it was an indie boom. And by the next year, it was almost indie became a genre. Do you know what I mean? And it was exciting to be around that.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Very exciting. Congratulations. We're, we're not going to talk about your extraordinary career. Well, no, I mean, you are, correct me if I'm wrong. Am I right that you are the only Australian ever to win the triple crown of an Emmy, a Tony and an Oscar?

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's nice.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  I think if, if you want to be really pedantic, you say a prime time Emmy. You don't want it to be a

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Daytime. Well done. The real thing.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Uh, I think that is true.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  So because of the, because of the, uh, the Oscar that you, you win for Shine, that leads to everything else. That leads to Elizabeth, that re- leads to, uh, Shakespeare in Love, that leads to all the other Pirates of the Caribbean, all the sort of the big commercial things, which is fantastic. Uh.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  What I liked about the triple crown thing, it kind of, it just sort of felt, it made me feel numb. But I went, I'm really pleased that the, the Oscar was for an Australian film. And I think it still holds a record for the seven nominations and it being of an indie status. You know, I think Fury Road and films like that have kind of gazumped it. Uh, and the, the, uh, Emmy was for our Belvoir Malthouse theatre production of Ionesco's hardly known play. Um, that it, it

• 51:13Speaker 02

  took Broadway by storm and we played a kind of weird existential tragedy comedy burlesque farce because I knew the vaudeville of it.

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• 52:34Speaker 03

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• 52:40Speaker 04

  Love the crown molding.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 52:45Speaker 04

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• 52:49Speaker 03

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 52:53Speaker 04

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• 53:38Speaker 01

  What sort of, are you an unusual person? The only film of yours that I want to really talk about at all is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, only because I met him and he was the most unusual human being, both genius and oddity.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  And are you, I mean, in your head, are you genius and oddity? Or are you just working actor? What, what are you? What do you see yourself as?

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Uh, I, I veer towards extremities. Um, but, uh,

• 54:16Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's, it's trusting us, the, the ability to just play and only play and have the, the truth of your playing being honest. Uh, and also to, uh,

• 54:41Speaker 02

  put excitement into it. I want it to be like a little Richard record in three minutes, you know?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  It all goes back to all that, those fireworks on Cracker Day and those amazing flowers. You want to give us all of that. And you still also want to go back to Merle. Very intriguing. Just you touched on, you brought it up there, the, the traumas, I imagine it was 10 years ago of that issue that ended in defamation and a legal case. For people who don't know about it, in a sentence, describe it and also tell us what it was like for you, that experience, just in a nutshell.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  A newspaper run by a very famous Australian tabloid newspaper owner, uh, uh, they decided in the wake of some post Harvey Weinstein articles, they wanted something like that for their output. And a couple emerged of stories, but they were like minor TV people or things. Uh, it's an issue that should have been dealt with through the HR of the theatre company involved. And they, I was stymied, snooped by that. I phoned them up. I said, what's going on? I'm being

• 56:03Speaker 02

  accused of something tomorrow. It's going out in the newspaper. And they said, you don't work for us anymore. So you're not under our jurisdiction. And, and then it just, it, the, the media pushed it into a case about harassment rather than I was suing a newspaper.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  So it was, to use the part of the time, a me too moment.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Uh, but it got out of hand because a newspaper ran it as a story. You had to, to save your career, take action against the newspaper and ultimately you were successful.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  I was.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  To the extent of, I think, millions of dollars of your, of Australian dollars.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  It was financially successful, but, but emotionally and creatively very crushing. I think for everybody involved in it, really.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Um, and now it's 10 years ago, isn't it?

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, late, well, nine.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Nine years. And have you come through it professionally? I mean, did it damage your, yes, it damaged your work prospects for a while.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  It did, but it, it made me, I've, I've got two things about to come out and in 23, I met up with a New Zealand director that just felt like a soulmate artistically, doing a wonderful bizarre horror, psychological thriller about people in an aged care facility, at which I am now the right age to play those sorts of characters. Um, and it was very fulfilling. Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  I'm so sad that I haven't seen your King Lear. Are you going to do it again? Was it filmed?

• 57:50Speaker 02

  I had, no, no, it wasn't. I don't think it was very good.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Because sitting here, you seem to me awed to play.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  No. Well, see, I went for, you know, when we shot the poster, I said to Neil,

• 58:05Speaker 02

  The Anglo tradition seems to be hardcore,

• 58:14Speaker 02

  black and white, chunky photography of beard and white and an autocrat and patriarch. I said, my way in is gonna be through, what if Gogol had written King Lear? And I'm going into act four where he's bedecked with flowers and absolutely lost touch with reality.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  I can see you doing that perfectly.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  But for some reason, we never, it was just, I don't think we cracked it.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Well, you've got time. You've got plenty of time. We're coming towards the end now. Are you easy to live with? You're fun to be with. Are you easy to live with? We should ask Jane.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  I have, my, my children are very strong minders, I think. My daughter is so special to me.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  How many children do you have?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Two. She was an IVF baby and that was a journey in itself. We had a wonderful IVF team in Melbourne back in the early nineties. The mathematics of it, the science of it, the, you know, the commitment of what the parents and more so the mother has to go through. It was a rough journey, but we were pleased that we survived it. And it did, the doctor did suggest at the end, go for a quick Caesarean. You've been through hell.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  It's, the labour has not been the best. When this young newborn was held up in front of us, we felt we'd known her for an eternity and it was just

• 59:59Speaker 02

  something else. And she's still got that pluck. She's now enjoying a very interesting career as a theatre designer.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  And your son?

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  He's a burgeoning filmmaker. He applies to,

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  I brought him once here at the Serpentine to a Stanley Kubrick exhibition and he realised Kubrick was a photographer. And he is turning, he's a wonderful photographer. And he's made some very good short films and he applies to these laboratories that happen and he's worked with, I may not get the names right, Apichat upon Wiristachl, who's a Thai director that millennials, you know,

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  ovate. And then there's Andrei Zvechnsiev, who made Loveless and some tough Russian films, Leviathan. He went and did a workshop with him. And the short films he made, again, he was thrown into it saying, where they said, you find the film. It's gotta be you. And I think that's a terribly important thing, to not just be an interpreter, but to be an inventor.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I think maybe you are reasonably easy to live with. You certainly think you are. And I think you think you're, you're quite easy in your head now, aren't you? You're in a good place at the moment?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Which is great.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  One or two Negronis and I'm a really normal, happy-go-lucky fellow.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Do you feel Australian today? Are you an Australian? Well, you have the Order of Australia, which is the highest accolade that can be given. You're Australian, isn't it? You are. You're a member of the Order.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  I think it's, I can never remember, no, it's a companion of the Order.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Forgive me, that's a higher rank. I think that that is the highest rank.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  We've had others.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  I kept saying it's the Commodore. No, I could, no, it's not.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  You are a companion of the Order of Australia. That's numero uno.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Well done, Geoffrey. Do you feel, what is it like to be Australian? What does it mean being Australian? Today, twenty twenty six.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  I feel very Australian. Because of things I've talked about today, that they're, that's the soil that we come out of, you know, and when I was given that honour,

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  I said, you know, it's like the arts, you have to realise that it's like, a lot of people don't think we do it. I go, no, they're like spiders. They're there. There's always two or three in a room, a metre away from you. But most Australians are ready to roll up a newspaper and just bash the shit out of them.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Where will you be buried? Have you decided?

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Jeez, I didn't think that was gonna, we're gonna have lunch.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  It's rather a good question. We, we'll discuss it maybe over lunch. But that's for future reference. It's quite a nice question. Where would you be buried? Have you thought about that?

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  I think, I think I would probably choose Toowoomba.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Of course you would.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Three quick final questions. When I say to you, a moment of sadness, what comes into your head?

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  We love dogs and we've had members of our family that have been very important to us.

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Jane had a big family history of pugs and we continued that. We had a beautiful pug called Sweep and a beautiful pug called Eloise. We had a big greyhound called Henslow after my

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Very successful Shakespeare.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Their deaths, two of them had to be, Henslow had to be put down because he developed terrible kind of psychosis and things. And it just, we just, the sense of loss for all of us was enormous.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  And how long ago did Merle and Roy die?

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  In twenty two.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Oh, not long ago.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, she had a good life up until ninety four.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  To the end?

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I had, you know, when I went to Europe, I knew that

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  life in Australia wasn't everything to me. You know?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  And it was to her.

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  And I liked, I liked

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  forging my own path.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  And Roy, what happened to him?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Roy would have died, I can't think when. I think he went into a little bit of dementia and had married a number of times.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  No, he, he kind of evaporated away.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Have you become one person? Because you talked earlier about the effect of having these separated parents and yet you lost Roy eventually. And you talked about a bifurcation and being two people. Are you one person now? Do you think you've come together? Or do you still have different compartments? Are you still different people on different days?

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  You know, because of my La Cocker explorations, I like my clown element. I also like my bouffant, dark, dangerous,

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  radical, you know, abrasive,

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  confrontational thing.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  This is why you're so good at these things like the UNESCO exit, the King, the Gogol. Because it's a bit of you, isn't it?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  I suppose, yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Moment of joy. A moment of joy. What comes into your head? All of a sudden, hey.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  It, it was definitely, and Jane and I have shared this moment over and over. It was when Angelica was held aloft. We just went, you know, I don't know what happens. You just,

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  it's, it's an overwhelming.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Many people will think of you simply in terms of the films that they've seen, that you are an Australian film star. We now see that you are that, but also so much of your life has been in the theatre. You're this curious mix of a clown and also a really quite serious intellectual person who loves reading deeply. You're a fascinating mixture, if I may say so. And you've had highs, huge highs. I mean, my gosh, no Australian has won in the theatre and cinema as many awards as you have. Well done. And you've had lows. I mean, you were, you were cancelled for a while. So you've had that and you've had that. You've got Jane, you've got these children. What has life taught you, Geoffrey Rush? What have you learnt as we finish here?

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  It's, you know, the great lines of the readiness is all. And ripeness is all for Edgar. They're two great discoveries and that's all for me. They went, that's what I'm trying to do. At least struggle with that. Be ready and get ripe.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Well, you're certainly ripe and I think you're ready. And I'll give a quotation of Shakespeare's now from Hamlet, the rest is silence. Thank you so much, Geoffrey.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  You're so neat.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Wonderful.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  My thanks there to Geoffrey Rush. Two very interesting films coming up for him. I'm looking forward to seeing them. I very much enjoyed talking to him and very much enjoyed meeting his wife, Jane, as well. Actually, do you know Harriet Jane, my producer and I? We are so lucky that really interesting people make their way to our door. Geoffrey Rush, based in Australia, but he was in Italy until yesterday. He flew in from Pisa, 16-hour flight, everything went wrong, but he still turned up and, well, was as fascinating as I hope you found him. So our thanks to him. And funnily enough, he then said, oh, I'm going on, he said, he is a regular listener to Rosebud, which I think, I suppose, is why he did it.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  He said, I'm going on to see Ralph Fiennes in a play. I'll say hello to him from you. And then later in the week, I'm going to see Felicity Kendall in High Society the Musical. I'll say hello to her from you. We're very lucky that we have these extraordinary guests on Rosebud. So I do thank them and I thank you for listening. And if, by the way, there are people you think, oh, why haven't they yet had so-and-so? Drop us a line and we'll see if we can get hold of them. Sometimes I say to them genuinely, the reason I'm writing to you is that this week, somebody wrote in and said, would you please invite so-and-so to be the guest? So do write. The address is very simple. It's [email protected]. [email protected]. Harriet sees most of the emails.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  She tries to reply to as many as she can personally, but we now have a colleague called Marie, who is helping in that department as well, which is fantastic. And we also, of course, have another colleague in Alec Goodell, my wife's godson, who is helping us edit some of the shows, including, I think, this one with Geoffrey Rush. So though Harriet Jane is the producer and I'm still asking the questions, we've got a little team now. We need a little team. We've got a big audience. We love you. Thank you very much. And thank you for writing in. Somebody's written here, Dear Harriet and Giles. Still find that slightly irritating, you know? It's alphabetical, G-H, Dear Giles and Harriet. You've written Dear Harriet and Giles because that's how you see us. Okay, let's read the letter now.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Dear Harriet and Giles, Listening to more Rosebud last week, Giles, you mentioned going to Stratford-on-Avon by train and bewailed the lack of a proper train service. It reminded me of a break my husband and I took there back in the day when British Rail did package holidays. Rail travel plus accommodation. Probably the 1980s, we booked a travel from our local but small station. We turned up to catch the train on our holiday schedule sent by British Rail, only to be told by the station master that the said train didn't stop at that station. After showing him our itinerary and some discussion, he phoned somewhere and arranged for the train to stop for us. Excellent service, we felt, really special.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  But it did confuse a number of people already on the train, some of whom thought they were at their destination until they saw the name of the station, and others waiting for the train after hours who were not sure if they should get on or not. We had a great journey via Reading, and I do remember being surprised when the train for Stratford turned up and it was just two carriages. Our journey home at the end of our stay was quite ordinary and boring. Thank you for Rosebud. It's so interesting to hear all of your guests and your memories. The episodes often remind me of things from my life. I was born four years after you, Giles, so have lived through the same time period, more or less. I look forward to future episodes. With all good wishes, Sue.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Well, we look forward to more episodes too. And we like to feel, when I'm reading my diaries to Harriet, I like to feel I'm introducing the younger generation to what life was like back in the day. So from our correspondent Sue, that's Sue Weekly. Well, we're here, Weekly, Sue Weekly. Thank you for being with us this week. It's been another fun episode with an international film star. That's always exciting. I don't know who we've got next Friday, but I hope it was somebody you will enjoy meeting too. Thank you for your company today. This has been Rosebud. Cue the music.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Rosebud is a Plain Jane production, produced by Harriet Jane, hosted by me, Gyles Brandreth, with music by Phil Leopard, and recorded this week at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London's Park Lane. Room service.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  Love the crown molding.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.

• 1:13:30Speaker 04

  No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.

• 1:13:36Speaker 05

  Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.

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