Geoffrey Rush could have ended up a rock star had he continued the way he started out.
Geoffrey Rush, Photo By Ros O'Gorman
Geoffrey, who has an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy to his name, has never won a Grammy Award but might have ended up with one if he kept his school band together. “I spent all my time at High School being in a rock band playing rhythm guitar,” he tells Noise11.com. “I was doing most of that to avoid doing sport. A tremendous time is devoted to people doing sport so I filled it in being in a rock band and then running the school drama club. Funnily enough one of them became what my career was about”.
Rush, who this year was named Australian of the Year, formed his band in Queensland in the mid 1960s. “In 1964 when we thought we were the new Shadows or the new Aussie band,” he says. “We started out as The Mob because there used to be a Melbourne band called The Throb and I used to get to know a lot of Melbourne bands in Queensland because we used to watch Happening 7 or Uptight. I was a huge Purple Hearts fan. Then we were Chills In Fever and then in the Sgt Pepper era we were The Shoelace Pashly Blue Showband. We didn’t write any original material unfortunately. We played covers”.
Geoffrey Rush may never have become a rock star but he worked with one. Rolling Stone Keith Richard was in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie with him. “He was sort of in and out on that and we didn’t really have one on one scenes. There was one group scene we did together,” he said.
Geoffrey will be back on stage again soon singing in the musical comedy ‘A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum’, playing for 12 weeks only in Melbourne from October. He has sung before. “You missed out on my Snoopy when I was in ‘You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown’ or when I was in ‘Pal Joey’ or when I was in ‘Bran Nue Dae’. On and off in my career I’ve had some sing-a-longs. I almost played the engineer in ‘Miss Saigon’. I was on the final list of two and then ‘Shine’ came along and I made a different choice,” he says.
‘A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum’, will be on at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne from October 27.
Watch the Noise11 interviews with Geoffrey Rush, Magda Szubanski and Shane Bourne.
