Geoffrey Rush is to play the lead in a musical biopic of Lionel Bart, the British composer of Oliver! who earned – and spent – millions despite having no formal training in music, reports Deadline.
Titled Consider Yourself, after the most famous song from Bart’s 1968 stage musical and film adaptation, the new film is being directed by Leon the Pig Farmer’s Vadim Jean. The impressive, mostly British cast also includes Stephen Fry, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan, Matt Lucas and Michelle Dockery. Marie Antoinette’s Al Weaver will play Bart in his younger years, with Rush stepping in for the latter part of the composer’s life.
The film is being billed as the story of the rise and fall of the eccentric songwriter, who died in 1999 at the age of 68. Born Lionel Begleiter in Stepney in 1930, the composer was the youngest of seven surviving children in a family of Galician Jews, his father working as a tailor out of a garden shed. Lionel’s parents were told when their son was just six years old that he might be a musical genius, but the young boy failed to apply himself until much later in life.
With no ability to read or write music, he nevertheless began writing songs for the stage in his early 20s, resulting in musicals like Fings Ain’t What They Used T’Be and Maggie May; he also wrote pop hits for Cliff Richard and the theme song for 1963 James Bond movie From Russia With Love. Rumour tells that Bart hummed the entire score for Oliver! to collaborator Eric Roberts, who transcribed the songs.
Bart is reported as earning the equivalent of £120,000 a week at the height of his success, but is said to have spent most of it on drink, drugs, and debauchery, so much so that he was forced to sell the publishing rights to his entire life works to Max Bygraves in 1972 for a pittance.
Consider Yourself, which is based on a screenplay by Loserville composer Elliot Davis, reportedly culminates with a down-on-his-luck Bart being given one last chance of glory in his later years. It will feature the songwriter’s music extensively, and the Tony award-winning choreographer of Billy Elliott: The Musical, Peter Darling, has also signed on.
Rush, the Queensland-born actor best known to the wider public for his regular turn as Captain Hector Barbossa in the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movies and supporting role in Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, is a multiple Oscar nominee who won best actor in 1996 for the biographical drama Shine.
