On to sketch #6 in my GR Sketch-a-thon challenge, where I’m counting down to Geoffrey Rush’s 70th birthday in July by trying to doodle as many of his roles as possible: this is another request from a Rushie friend of mine: here’s Inspector Javert from “Les Miserables” (1998, dir. Bille August).
I have a slightly love-hate relationship with this role because Geoffrey nearly didn’t accept the role of Walsingham in “Elizabeth” because he had just played Javert and he felt the parts might be too similar. I would like to say I’d never forgive Javert for this, but if Geoff hadn’t played Wals, I may never have fallen down another leg of the trousers of time and become a fan of his since Wals was my entry point, so I would probably never have watched this film, or discovered Geoff’s work. The horror. But I digress...
I’m not a big fan of Les Mis, it’s a bit of an overlong shuffle-along movie, but I have no quarrels with Geoff’s Javert. (Apart from the fact he nearly prevented my Walsingham from existing. Let’s not get me started again.)
The previous sketches in the “Countdown to the Big 7-0″ so far:
Stephen Price (House on Haunted Hill, 1999)
Leon Trotsky (Frida, 2002)
The Marquis de Sade (Quills, 2000)
Harry Pendel (Tailor of Panama, 2001)
David Helfgott (Shine, 1996)
(Still open to requests for future sketches! Drop me a message. I don’t mind Anonymous requests if you prefer.)
Hi new followers! Just a reminder what you're letting yourself in for:
I post a fair bit about history but I'm not an historian or a history student, I'm just interested. I have opinions™ like anyone but am open to education and love to learn! Please don't be rude about it if you disagree or I'm misinformed, though. I don't tolerate rude people no matter how well educated they are (or think they are). I've worked customer service at a vets for the past year, I don't need any more bullshit.
I love Henry VII. Sorry. (James Maxwell is my definitive Henny 💚)
I also love Francis Walsingham. Sorry. (Geoffrey Rush is my fave Wals 🖤 Though his sexy killer isn't very close to reality.)
I ship Walsingham with his Queen but only in the very specific context of the "Elizabeth" movie (1998)! I have this year started trying to finish a Walsibeth fic I started in 2008. Maybe I'll sort it before 2030...
I draw quite a lot. Usually Walsingham, again from "Elizabeth" 1998. He is my baby.
I am also, and have been for many years, a Geoffrey Rush fan. His Wals is my fave of his roles, though I have seen nearly all his films and been lucky enough to have seen him on stage in 2009. Obvs can't speak for other people, but he was ever kind, generous and lovely to myself and fellow fans back in the peak GR online fandom days.
I will write and draw smut, again mostly Walsibeth. My blog is aimed at 18+ adults only, please be sensible and cultivate your own feed appropriately.
I may post/repost random shit from other things I like; this may include Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, some anime, Game of Thrones, or whatever pings my interests.
I will reblog shit posts, memes and any other randomness I appreciate. Sometimes even serious political things.
My asks are open, do drop me a message if you want to ask me anything. I am happy to chat but I don't do small talk.
I'm a furry but don't post about that much here. I work as a dog trainer/carer in RL, I ride horses for fun, I love to travel (when I can afford to and when it's allowed); Australia is my fave place. I like theatre, I like castles and cathedrals, and I play Pokémon GO, message me for my friend code! I live near Nottingham in the UK.
I hope that covers most bases. Welcome to my corner of the internet! 😘
I’m at sketch #7 in my GR Sketch-a-thon challenge, where I’m counting down to Geoffrey Rush’s 70th birthday in July by trying to doodle as many of his roles as possible: here’s a rather bedraggled Virgil Oldman from nearer the end of “The Best Offer” (2013, dir.Giuseppe Tornatore). That film breaks my heart but he puts in a sensational performance.
I decided to do something different with the colours so we’re all blue today, but thought I’d post the basic sketch as well. I need to work on da nose but this turned out alright for a spur-of-the-moment doodle! I have a list of chars to do next after further banter with one of my old-skool Rushie pals on Twitter, so expect some of the late nineties/early noughties crowd next.
And the previous sketches in the “Countdown to the Big 7-0″ so far:
Inspector Javert (Les Miserables, 1998)
Stephen Price (House on Haunted Hill, 1999)
Leon Trotsky (Frida, 2002)
The Marquis de Sade (Quills, 2000)
Harry Pendel (Tailor of Panama, 2001)
David Helfgott (Shine, 1996)
I am still open to requests for future sketches if you have a fave Rush character - this can be from film, an animation, or even theatre providing there are reference pics for me to work from. Drop me a message. I don’t mind Anonymous requests if you prefer!
I’m getting behind already, need to try and do at least one of these a week...
“In conditions of adversity, the artist flourishes!” - the Marquis de Sade, Quills (2000)
Here’s the third contribution to my 2021 self-challenge, the GR sketchathon, an attempt to sketch as many of his roles as possible as we count down to his 70th b-day this year. Here’s the Marquis de Sade from “Quills”, one of my faves. Can’t decide if I like this sketch or not , but practice makes perfect.
Next up in the sketchathon - I have not decided! I may do a really obscure role... Feel free to DM me any requests though.
And so far:
Sketch 1: David Helfgott from “Shine” 1996
Sketch 2: Harry Pendel from “Tailor of Panama” 2001
Well this is cool, an old pal on LJ has requested the next GR sketch be from "Tailor of Panama". So Harry Pendel is next up in the big "Countdown to 70" sketchathon. (I may or may not try to draw the gay club dance scene, it might be just too ambitious for me...)
If anyone else has any requests for sketches of roles they would like to see sooner rather than later, hmu! My inbox is open!
- Stephen H. Price, House on Haunted Hill (1999, dir. William Malone)
Here’s sketch #5 in my GR Sketch-a-thon challenge, where I’m counting down to his 70th birthday in July by trying to doodle as many of his roles as possible: it’s Stephen H. Price, a role which plays homage to the great Vincent Price, in the remake of “House on Haunted Hill”. As a horror movie, it’s underwhelming, you’ll jump once or twice, but any Rush fan will enjoy the sheer amount of screen time he has and rejoice in seeing the amount of fun he has in this hammy role.
I really struggled getting this drawing right which I’m sad about as I love his Stephen Price and he looks beaut in so many stills, I wanted to capture that but... failed. Sometimes I just can’t get my artistic shit together. I may draw him again at some point and try to do better. He’s too lush not to, I mean, look at him! 😘
And is it some kind of mystical dyad if you’re fave actor plays a tribute to another of your fave actors? I really love Vincent Price so HoHH is a total guilty pleasure. There are some shots that you glance at Geoff and you’re like “daaaamn, he looks like Vincent!” (And if you’ve not seen the original, it’s definitely worth a watch - it wasn’t what I was expecting, and it honestly made me jump at least once, which is as much as the remake managed to do. Plus you get to see Vincent in all his tall, handsome, hammy glory...)
And the rest of the Countdown-to-Geoff’s-70th-birthday sketches I’ve done so far:
Leon Trotsky (Frida, 2002)
The Marquis de Sade (Quills, 2000)
Harry Pendel (Tailor of Panama, 2001)
David Helfgott (Shine, 1996)
(Still open to requests for future sketches! Preferably obscure roles, I’ll get to Barbossa ofc further down the line.)
Here’s the first of my planned sketches for my GR big 7-0 countdown. I hope to do one for each of his many film/TV roles (though perhaps not the really obscure ones), and I may squeeze in some theatre roles if I can. This is ofc Rush as David Helfgott in “Shine” (1996), the film role which landed him an Oscar and catapulted him to international stardom.
Here’s a nifty wee article from 2013 about “Shine” from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/australia-culture-blog/2013/dec/27/shine-rewatching-classic-australian-films It’s a fantastic film; I re-watched it recently and had forgotten just how powerful it was. Always worth a revisit if you haven’t seen it for a while - or worse, have never seen it!
So... I’m aiming to write a little blog post every week leading up to Geoffrey’s 70th birthday. Hopefully I can find lots of stuff to talk about. They won’t be long posts, or possibly even coherent, but I want to just share some of my love for this guy this year. Though inadvertent, he has proved to be an artistic muse for me over the past few months, during covid, furlough and all the other ups-and-downs of 2020, and his work helped draw me out of a dark place I hadn’t realised I’d been in for many years. Past memories of my fan days really helped as I recalled the days of old when us “Rushies” had a tight-knit fan group, and thought of all the films we watched, the meet-ups we had - I’m still pals with so many of you! GR was a great source of inspiration to me in my early twenties, and was also exceptionally kind and generous to so many of us; I feel so fortunate to have been part of something so special, and both reliving and rekindling this fan-love has made me so much happier in recent times.
For this initial written blog post in my countdown to his b-day, I thought I would just recount how I became a GR fan. Like many things, it was just one part of a chain of events. I think it’s fair to say it’s because of Christopher Eccleston and “Doctor Who”. After the first series of the (what was then) new “Doctor Who” finished in summer 2005, and it was clear ninth Doctor actor Christopher Eccleston wasn’t coming back, I looked for other sources of Eccleston’s work to get over the despair of losing him after just one season; I’d thoroughly loved him as the ninth Doctor and I couldn’t bear the thought that he wasn’t coming back for more.
A Live Journal pal of mine mentioned “Elizabeth” at some point, the 1998 film in which Eccleston plays the Duke of Norfolk; I think my friend said something alone the lines of he was “half expecting Rose to jump out from somewhere” whilst he watched it. Now I enjoyed watching historical dramas, and I needed an Eccleston fix, so I went out and bought “Elizabeth” and watched it. Yes, Eccleston was good in it, though very cold and austere, but what I came away with were two other questions which had little to do with Eccleston: 1) who was that Francis Walsingham in real history? and 2) who the devil was that Geoffrey Rush who played Walsingham?
Now, if you have read Terry Pratchett, you’ll be familiar with the concept of the “Trousers of Time”. Dear reader, watching “Elizabeth” was when I toppled down an alternate leg. That movie, still probably one of my absolute fave films, gave me two-fold new obsessions: both reading about the real Francis Walsingham (who, no, wasn’t quite the sexy assassin of the 1998 movie, but is still insanely interesting) and watching Geoffrey Rush work his magic.
My interest garnered, I think I went initially to Wikipedia to look up both Walsingham and Rush. And blow me, I realised that Rush was also in “Pirates of the Caribbean” which was on my DVD rack. I hadn’t even realised it was the same actor! ^^; Barbossa and Walsingham aren’t exactly alike. After I’d re-watched him in PotC with a renewed appreciation, it was then a case of going through his filmography and picking out further films in which to ogle him: I think I went for “Quills” after PotC and “Elizabeth”, and Christ, once you’ve seen “Quills” there’s no going back. I was hooked. I fucking adored him.
If I’m honest, I rarely fixate on individual actors - I can count only two actors in my lifetime I’ve truly fixated on, and they are Geoffrey Rush and, when I was very young, probably only 17 years old, I fixated on Christopher Lee. I have of course liked other actors, had crushes, but Rush and Lee remain the ones where I’ve obsessively sought out their work as far as humanly possible and haven’t been able to let them go. I have also been really lucky and met each of them twice, though Rush went above and beyond anything I expected when it came to leaving me with memories to last a lifetime; Lee was of course of a different generation and an entirely different type of artist, from a different era, so it’s unfair to compare them to one-another really. Geoffrey was very much more approachable and down-to-earth - Lee was quite intimidating, but very polite and kind and a real gent. Either way, what great fortune, to have met two influential actors in my life!
I’ll try think up another topic for another GR ramble within the next week or so. If you have any questions or comments, ofc, feel free to drop me a DM! I don’t bite. :)
