At a gala dinner at the Melbourne Convention Centre on 1 August 2009 Australian actor and international star Geoffrey Rush was awarded with the industry’s highest honour for his outstanding contribution to our screen environment and culture.

To read the full transcript of the Geoffrey Rush's speech click here

First presented in 1968, the AFI Raymond Longford Award, an award in honour of the masterful and indefatigable Australian film pioneer Raymond Longford, is the highest accolade that can be bestowed on an individual and recognises a truly outstanding contribution to the enrichment of Australia’s screen environment and culture.

In 2009 this Award was presented for the first time at the AFI Outstanding Achievement Dinner which provides the AFI and the screen industry with the opportunity to salute the recipient’s extensive body of work and acknowledge their past and ongoing role in Australia’s evolving screen landscape.

 

Geoffrey Rush receives the

2009 AFI Raymond Longford Award

Some past winners of the prestigious AFI Raymond Longford Award include Tim Burstall, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Dr George Miller, Jan Chapman, Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell, Jack Thompson, Ray Barrett, Patricia Lowell and many more.

Geoffrey is a fitting recipient of the newly-minted AFI Raymond Longford Award for outstanding achievement. He is a king of stage and screen, who has uniquely captured the hearts and minds of not just judges and critics but of audiences around the world.

Damian Trewhella, CEO of the AFI, said: ‘We are especially pleased that our expanded focus on the AFI Raymond Longford Award and launch of the 2009 AFI Awards season is being held in association with the Melbourne International Film Festival, that grand beauty from which the AFI was established half a century ago”. 

Geoffrey Rush is quite simply one of the world’s greatest actors. At home and abroad he is recognised by his peers as a first among equals. When it came to Hollywood’s greatest prize, he was the first Australian-born actor to win an Academy Award – and the only Australian actor to ever win it for a performance in an Australian film.  This victory – for his unforgettable performance as virtuoso pianist David Helfgott, in Shine – was sweet indeed.

But this was just one award, in a long career (of more than 70 films and 40 plays) studded with prestigious trophies. With a certain unconquerable style, Geoffrey recently became the first Australian to ascend into an elite international company of just sixteen actors, attaining the coveted Triple Crown of Acting: an Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award, all on his first attempt. He’s also received the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, the Screen Actors Guild Award, not to mention two AFI Awards.

Known by millions of cinema-goers as the swashbuckling Captain Barbossa in the franchise blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean, Geoffrey is equally loved for his roles in more rarefied fare. His range and versatility are well illustrated with outstanding performances as Peter Sellers in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers; as the Marquis de Sade in Quills; and as a beguilingly Machiavellian courtier to Cate Blanchett’s queen in Elizabeth.

A master of the stage, long before we ever saw him on screen, Geoffrey has recently been playing to packed houses on Broadway, appearing as the 400-year-old dying monarch in the Neil Armfield-directed play, Exit the King. It was following this triumphant Broadway run that Geoffrey won the coveted Tony Award and thanked the New York audiences for proving, as he put it, “that French existential absurdist tragicomedy rocks.”

In a career full of innovation and risk-taking, and an incomparable commitment to excellence, Geoffrey’s reputation and profile have helped drive Australian screen culture into new realms of accomplishment and recognition both locally and internationally.

In our own films he’s added his brilliance to works as varied as Candy, Oscar and Lucinda, Shine, Children of the Revolution and the upcoming Bran Nue Dae.

His contributions to the Australian screen industry and the AFI are truly substantial: from these many spectacular film performances to his frequent and deeply valued participation in many local events, including some of the wittiest and most elegant presentations of the AFI Awards.

 

Shine

 

Geoffrey will need a new sideboard in his Camberwell home: he is already one of the most awarded actors of our time, and to all of those awards he is now able to add the prestigious AFI Raymond Longford Award….

 – Congratulations Geoffrey!