Geoffrey Rush

Born: July 1951
Where: Queensland, Australia

The former theatre hand has become one of the world's most acclaimed actors after breaking into films relatively late in his career.

Now firmly on the Hollywood A-List, he has breathed life into roles ranging from Leon Trotsky in Frida to Peter Sellers in Stephen Hopkins' biopic.

During his time at the University of Queensland in Australia, he joined the Queensland Theatre Company in Brisbane and made his stage debut in Wrong Side of the Moon.

Still on stage, Rush found success as Snoopy in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and subsequently moved to France to further his studies of the dramatic arts.

He made the most of his time in Europe by enrolling in classes at the Jacques Lecoq School of Mime, Movement and Theater in Paris and also attending the British Theatre Association in London.

His stage directing debut came in Australia with the Queensland Theatre Company, Clowneroonies, and he then went on to work with Mel Gibson in Waiting for Godot.

By the early 1980s Rush had made a name for himself in Australian theatre and he became an ensemble performer with Jim Sharman's Lighthouse troupe.

His feature debut came in 1981 in Hoodwink, which was followed shortly by his role as a floor manager in Gillian Armstrong's Starstruck.

Rush continued his burgeoning stage career until 1992, garnering more and more critical acclaim as time went on.

After a temporary breakdown, attributed to a taxing performance schedule, he returned to the stage opposite Cate Blanchett in the stage production of David Mamet's Oleanna.

Finally in 1996 he won a Best Actor Oscar - aged 45 - and enormous international praise for his performance as the adult pianist David Helfgott in Scott Hicks' Shine.

Soon the big screen offers were flooding in. In 1998 he starred opposite Liam Neeson as Inspector Javert in dramatic adaptation of Les Miserables, and in the same year portrayed Sir Francis Walsingham in the award winning Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett.

Success was rife and he played Shakespeare's "scabby little theatrical producer" in Shakespeare in Love, also in 1998.

For this role the actor garnered his second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.

In 2000, Rush was cast as the Marquis de Sade in the feature adaptation of Quills, co-starring Kate Winslet, for which he received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination.

Rush also starred in the John Boorman-directed adaptation of the spy novel The Tailor of Panama, a nervy screenwriter in The Banger Sisters and Trotsky in Frida with Salma Hayek.

In 2003, he starred in the swashbuckling yarn Pirates of the Caribbean with Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley and The Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty.

Recent work includes his portrayal of the former Goon in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and the Australian domestic drama Swimming Upstream.