Odyssey, indeed. As he and writer Jan Sardi hammered out the script that would become Shine, they came to grasp the epic arc of Helfgott's saga: A child prodigy born in 1947, the brilliant pianist had suffered a severe nervous breakdown at London's Royal College of Music in 1970. For 13 years afterward, Helfgott bounced in and out of Australian psychiatric wards, only to be "rediscovered" one night--after his release from his last institution--when he burst into a crowded wine bar, made a beeline for the piano, and launched into Rimsky-Korsakov. Eventually Helfgott, a sweet eccentric given to wild torrents of verbiage, got married and returned to the concert stage in 1984.
No wonder Rush wanted the part. First, like Helfgott, Rush is a bona fide outsider in a country created by outsiders. Born in the country town of Toowoomba, raised and educated in Brisbane, Rush made his mark on the stage by specializing in madmen, clowns, and misfit alcoholics. Second, he's an actor's actor: When Rush and his wife, actress Jane Menelaus, got married eight years ago, they spent their honeymoon acting in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest--"so I got to propose to her every night on stage." With such instincts, Rush found Shine hard to resist.
"This script plopped on my desk," says Rush, who has two young children (Anjellica, 4, and James, 1). "And I just thought: 'This is me. This is the one I've been waiting for.'"
Days after he got the part, Rush rushed out to see Helfgott perform. "When he comes out to play, he shuffles out, he kisses people in the front row, he's muttering, he's mumbling, he's laughing," the actor fondly remembers. "And then at the keyboard he's terribly eloquent and focused." To capture that clash of chaos and calm, Rush memorized Helfgott's loopy ramblings by listening to hours of the virtuoso talking on tape. He took piano lessons, advancing to where he could play portions of the classical repertoire. Though you hear the real Helfgott on the Shine soundtrack, you're often watching Rush's fingers--not a double's--tickling the ivories.
Rush's acting is so propulsive that he might wind up bumping into Gibson at next spring's Oscars. (Mel's memories of those lean years in Sydney: "It was pretty desperate. We would sit on the floor and eat dinner and stuff. One of us used to drag in the occasional virgin and sacrifice her on a Friday night.") Rush is already facing the dilemma that his housemate dealt with 17 years ago: Hollywood, Hamlet, or both? "It's been a very fulfilling career, and I don't want to suddenly throw all that out the window and do something trashy that pays a lot of money," says Rush. "But I will have to confront that nasty thing of, well, how much money?"
Rush, after all, did just buy his first fax machine. "Instead of having a midlife crisis," he says with a sly grin, "I suddenly got into the movies."
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