SANTA BARBARA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Actor Geoffrey Rush will receive the Montecito Award as part of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival at 7 p.m. Monday in the Arlington Theatre, 1317 State St.

Here are some other highlights from the festival’s 26th edition, which kicked off Thursday night and continues through Feb. 6. More than 170 films from 49 countries will be featured, including 30 world and 33 U.S. premieres.

n The Feb. 2 Centerpiece film is “That’s What I Am,” starring the husband-and-wife acting duo Ed Harris and Amy Madigan, among others.

n The Feb. 6 closing night film is “Carmen in 3D,” based on Georges Bizet’s popular opera.

n Other celebrity tributes (all at 8 p.m. and at the Arlington Theatre, unless otherwise noted): Annette Bening, American Riviera Award, tonight; James Franco, Outstanding Performance of the Year Award, Saturday night; Christopher Nolan, Modern Master Award, Sunday night (with a special appearance by Leonardo DiCaprio); 14-year-old Thousand Oaks phenom Hailee Steinfeld and fellow Virtuoso Award honorees Andrew Garfield, John Hawkes, Lesley Manville and Jacki Weaver, Feb. 4 at the Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido St.; and Nicole Kidman, Cinema Vanguard Award, Feb. 5.

n The free Apple Box family festival for parents and kids will be held on mornings of both festival weekends, featuring “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Tangled,” both in 3-D.

n Other features returning include discussion panels, film awards, student filmmaking and screenwriting competitions, and the free 3rd Weekend screenings (Feb. 11-13 at the Riviera Theatre) of films that win festival awards.

n For tickets, prices, schedules and other information, call the festival office at 963-0023 or visit http://www.sbfilmfestival.org.

———————- Focus Features Annette Bening, an Oscar nominee for her role in “The Kids Are All Right,” will be on hand to accept the American Riviera Award tonight at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

bjohnson@VCStar.com

Geoffrey Rush goes jaw to jaw with Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech” in what some have said is one of the best one-on-one acting performances in recent cinematic history.

Now, Rush indicated, he’s acquired a new BFF; he and Firth “text each other all the time.” And they have new names.

“Colin and I have become very good mates due to this,” Rush said in a vintage Australian accent as a laugh built. “We refer to ourselves as ‘Thelma and Louise.’”

The pair’s many memorable scenes have turned “The King’s Speech” into a critical darling and a surprising box-office hit. Firth plays King George VI (known as the Duke of York and “Bertie” early in the film) and Rush is Lionel Logue, the eccentric speech therapist who helps the nascent monarch overcome his debilitating stammer in time for an inspirational 1939 radio address as Britain was entering World War II.

Rush and Firth picked up Academy Awards nominations Tuesday for their roles, and the film leads the Oscars pack with 12 overall nominations.

For Rush, this type of thing is old hat: He’s one of fewer than two-dozen performers to have won the so-called “Triple Crown of Acting” — an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony.

The veteran 59-year-old actor called awards season “a strange beast,” adding, “There is a lot of hoopla, but I think we can strike a reasonable balance between commerce and art.”

He’ll try to do that Monday night when he drops into the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to pick up the Montecito Award, given for a series of career standout or classic performances. Rush has those in spades, including his Oscar-winning turn in “Shine” and other credits such as “Quills,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Munich.” Past recipients have included Julianne Moore, Kate Winslet, Javier Bardem, Naomi Watts and Annette Bening.

The festival’s 26th edition kicked off Thursday with the opening-night film “Sarah’s Key” and continues through Feb. 6, featuring more than 170 films, a half-dozen star tributes, other events, and an expected attendance of more than 70,000.

A recent interview found Rush on the line, 19 hours ahead, from Sydney, Australia’s biggest and most populous city; he’s there doing the Nikolai Gogol play “The Diary of a Madman.” He flashed his typical charm and sly humor, but also fretted about the flooding — “major devastation,” he said somberly — to the north in the Australian state of Queensland, from where he hails. He was born in Toowoomba, grew up in suburban Brisbane, Queensland’s capital city, and has an arts degree from the University of Queensland.

“Diary” is another of his returns to his long-tentacled stage roots; later this year, Rush will play Lady Bracknell in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of the Oscar Wilde classic “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

Rush will mark a couple milestones in 2011 — 40 years on stage (his 1971 debut, at age 20, was with the Queensland Theatre Company) and 30 in film (his first was the small 1981 Australian movie “Hoodwink”).

AP file photo Rush’s 1997 Oscar victory for “Shine” put him on the path to nab acting’s Triple Crown: an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy.

Walt Disney Pictures Geoffrey Rush, right, and Johnny Depp are both aboard for the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” film, which is slated to open in May. “You wouldn’t think they could find anything new for Jack Sparrow and the pirates to do, but they have,” Rush says.

Chris Young / The Canadian Press Geoffrey Rush says he and the rest of “The King’s Speech” cast never dreamed the film would earn a dozen Academy Award nominations. “I don’t think any of us were thinking Oscars,” he says.

The Weinstein Co. In “The King’s Speech,” Geoffrey Rush plays an eccentric speech therapist who helps King George VI overcome a chronic stammer.

Laurie Sparham/ The Weinstein Company Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth and Derek Jacobi in Tom Hooper’s film THE KING’S SPEECH.

AP file photo Rush completed the “Triple Crown of Acting” in 2009, earning a Tony Award for his performance in “Exit the King.”

AP file photo Playing the title role in the miniseries “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” earned Rush his Emmy in 2005.

High quality on a high wire

For all his past success, Rush is happy “The King’s Speech” came along. He called it “one of those out-of-the-blue gifts.”

It also afforded what Rush called “a rare privilege” — a relatively lengthy rehearsal period, which he placed at six or seven weeks. Noted Rush, “That doesn’t happen often in films.”

The script pretty much demanded such meticulous care. Rush said he and others were aware that the film’s success would turn on the tour-de-force acting clinic of sorts between him and Firth.

“We saw these two characters going mano a mano for pages on end and we thought, ‘We better rehearse this,’” Rush said.

The extended on-screen intimacy was unusual, even to a seasoned veteran; Rush said the only other time he could remember two characters “wrapped around each other” for so long was in a play he once did with fellow Aussie and Oscar winner Cate Blanchett.

Something clicked. The London paper The Guardian said Rush and Firth take to it with “pure theatrical gusto.” The New York Times deemed them “appealing and impeccably professional.” The Philadelphia Inquirer said the two “elevate each other’s game to the stratosphere and beyond.”

Others praised the pair for not indulging in showiness and making King George VI and Logue human. The Chicago Tribune opined that Rush “has never given a more contained or moving screen performance.”

The film’s 12 Oscar nominations also include best picture, Tom Hooper for best director, Helena Bonham Carter as best supporting actress and best original screenplay. The other nods are for cinematography, musical score, costume design, art direction, editing and sound mixing.

Firth, Carter and Hooper are expected to be on hand for Rush’s Santa Barbara salute, which will include a best ensemble cast award.

At last check, the film had garnered a terrific 96 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

All of which astonishes Rush, a bit.

“The script presented us with dramatic challenges, but I don’t think any of us were thinking Oscars,” he said. “We were thinking about how to play these oddball, unusual or off-center characters. And it didn’t seem like it would be a crowd-pleaser.”

Talkin’ a good game

The film details Logue’s unconventional methods for helping the king’s speech impediment — including swearing loudly. It’s filled with all manner of unusual vocal sounds, guttural noises and the like. Somewhat surprisingly, Rush said, all the vocal cord workouts and weird sounds weren’t a challenge.

“There is a lot of overlap between those very unorthodox (speech therapy) practices of that time and the vocal training actors go through in their careers,” he said, alluding to how they learn to best project their voice and build dexterity into their vocal projections.

He also was quick to laud his dialogue coach, Barbara Berkery, who has worked with him on a half-dozen or so other movies in his career.

“I’d have 8 a.m. shoots for ‘The King’s Speech’ and I’d spend a good half-hour with her beforehand,” Rush said. “She’s one of the unsung heroes of the film.”

He also praised the work of his cinematic combatant, Firth, who was honored at last year’s Santa Barbara festival.

“In a lot of our scenes,” Rush noted, “I was sitting two meters away from him as he was playing a character who could have been fraught with so many pitfalls.”

Firth was able to deftly get to the deeper, underlying psychological aspects of a complex character, Rush said, adding, “I was in awe of the nuances, subtleties and shadings Colin brought to it.”

The success of “The King’s Speech” has Rush drawing parallels to another film he knows well, 1996’s “Shine,” for which he won his Oscar for his portrayal of troubled and dysfunctional pianist David Helfgott.

The two were similar “in that you have no idea when you start out where it might go.” With “Shine,” he noted, “we knew we were making a strong, satisfying story that would defy any Hollywood pitch. You could feel the door slamming in your face.”

And yet, Rush noted, that “very, very small film” from Australia gained momentum and rose into the public zeitgeist — just as “The King’s Speech,” also shot on a relatively modest budget, seems to be doing.

Triple Crowns, and this and that

In addition to winning the best actor Oscar for “Shine,” Rush won an Emmy for his 2004 performance as the legendary and enigmatic British comedian Peter Sellers in the HBO biopic “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.” He completed the acting Triple Crown by winning the Tony in 2009 for his work in “Exit the King” on Broadway. Interestingly, Rush won all three on his first try, or nomination.

The Triple Crown has been achieved by such other luminaries as Ingrid Bergman, Al Pacino, Jason Robards, Jessica Tandy, Vanessa Redgrave and Anne Bancroft.

“Look, it is amazing,” offered Rush, who then downplayed the feat by noting he didn’t set out to do it. “It’s just one of those things that suddenly happened.”

Looking back across his work, Rush said a common reaction he gets is that he plays a lot of crazy people. He doesn’t see it that way, preferring the term larger-than-life characters, such as Logue, Sellers, Helfgott or the Marquis de Sade (which he played in the 2000 film “Quills”). He admits he’s drawn to that kind of persona, as well as big dimensions and grand scenes.

On the big screen, Rush will be seen in the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” film, reprising his role as the pirate Barbossa, alongside Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow. It’s due in theaters in May. Despite the franchise’s familiarity, Rush — who’s been in all four — said the upcoming one is imbued with fresh ideas and characters.

“You wouldn’t think they could find anything new for Jack Sparrow and the pirates to do, but they have,” he said. “It’s very exciting.”

Amid his stage work, Rush plans to take a break this year — at least in between bopping across the Pacific from Down Under to attend festivals and awards shows.

He said he’s been to Santa Barbara before, as part of a journey along the California coast he and his family once took (he’s been married for more than 20 years to accomplished Australian classical actress Jane Menelaus; they have two kids). He called Santa Barbara a great town and said he was taken by the “fabulous” Spanish-tile roofs.

His “Diary of a Madman” work explains the black fedora and bald head he sported at the Jan. 16 Golden Globes. His character is bald; Rush said he wasn’t embarrassed by his baldness, but also didn’t want it to become a conversation piece all night, so he wore a hat.

The awards season swell adds up to a lot of arduous overseas flights, but Rush has come a long ways in a lot of ways. So too has “The King’s Speech.” And just as King George VI and his speech helper Lionel Logue remained friends for the rest of their lives, Rush seems to have found one in Firth.

Or is it Thelma? Or Louise?

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