Geoffrey Rush, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

To play the eponymous hero of HBO's new free-form bio-pic, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, the forthright Geoffrey Rush had to speak in nearly a dozen different accents. That might seem a picnic for an actor who has previously made himself into Leon Trotsky (Frida), Sir Francis Walsingham (Elizabeth) and the Marquis de Sade (Quills), not to mention his Oscar-winning turn as pianist David Helfgott (Shine). Yet he tells Stephen Schaefer that he resisted the Sellers role - one that brought him a shiny new Golden Globe at just about the time he appeared as a junkie, opposite Heath Ledger, in the Australian Candy.

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