Geoffrey Rush

“Some people are very good at being themselves and being very natural on screen or being very sexy or handsome or whatever. I like that, and I aspire towards that, but I don't know if I always make it. I work very hard.”

“You had to be into sport and, sad to say, I'm a traitor to my country because I don't have a sporting bone in my body.”

“Someone told me that there's a connection to Superman, that in an early edition of the Green Lantern comics, Tomar Re was the envoy to Krypton. That was fascinating to me.”

“I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.”

“I was never a leading man. I've always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.”

“The hero of the 'Peanuts' is Charlie Brown. I play the dog that sleeps on the top of his dog box who's a philosopher. I'm drawn to that. So I'm drawn to Barbossa as I'm drawn to Einstein, because they are outsiders, and I suppose, as a character actor, that's the turf that you're locked into, in a way.”

“I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britain's greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive - and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger - or my own reputation.”

“My kids started school, so having a strong base in Melbourne has been a key priority. I'm not daunted by the travel. People say, 'It's so far to Australia,' and I say, 'You get on the plane, you eat well, you sleep, you wake up - and you're there.'”

“I always felt thrilled and amazed that I could put actor on my tax form.”

“Yes, anally retentive men are my forte!”

“My eye muscles hurt now when I read our MasterCard bill.”

“Yeah, well, the F-bomb - it's become as ubiquitous as the word 'like.' People just throw the word 'like' around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.”

“They were saying, 'Keep this under your hat, but Jack Sparrow's going to die in the second movie.' I went, 'You're kidding me. The fans are going to go berserk.'”

“What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English.”

“I asked, 'What is this guy?' They said, he's part-fish, part-bird, maybe a bit of lizard, and you don't have to go through five hours of makeup to play him. That was good enough for me.”

“I'm a very amateur scientist. For me, it started with the Mercury space program and onward to the moon landing in my impressionable adolescent years.”

“Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically.”

“I'm so envious of certain actors that have that natural facility to hear a cadence and the rhythm of an accent, that it goes into their brain and just comes out. Chameleon voices.”

“I guess I've been fortunate in having an ongoing film career while being based in Melbourne. I'm happy to commute. A day on a plane. Come on. It's easy.”

“Most films I've worked on have had large casts, but they've been wonderful people. I think the monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean is the most temperamental costar I've had. It would throw tantrums like you wouldn't believe.”