Born and raised in Albury, New South Wales, Richard Roxburgh initially attended college with the intention of a career in banking. Although he enjoyed studying economics, he was less impressed with the bank employees he encountered and changed his focus to theater. Following his training at NIDA, he honed his craft at various theater companies in Australia, playing everything from Shakespeare (Lysimachus in "Pericles", the title role in "Hamlet") to Oscar Wilde (Lord Goring in "An Ideal Husband") to Lanford Wilson (Pale in "Burn This") to Harold Pinter (an acclaimed turn as Lenny in "The Homecoming"). Along the way, he began acting in TV productions and in 1991 made his feature acting debut in "Dead to the World". His career was jump-started with his galvanizing portrayal of real-life police detective Roger Rogerson whose involvement in a 1980s police corruption scandal formed the basis of the controversial 1995 Australian miniseries "Blue Murder". Roxburgh earned critical acclaim for his work but ironically the show was not aired in his home province of New South Wales for nearly six years because of lawsuits.
Fresh off that triumph, Roxburgh could be seen as political insurgent Joe Welsh, the reputed illegitimate son of Joseph Stalin in the black comedy "Children of the Revolution" (1996). The following year, the actor enjoyed some of the best reviews of his career to that date for his work in the country-and-western-themed "Doing Time with Patsy Cline" and the rueful romance "Thank God He Met Lizzie", earning a Best Actor award from the Australian Film Institute for his turn as a lying drug dealer in the former. Roxburgh next played a pair of real-life characters, Australian government official William Hobbs in the miniseries "Frontier" and Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in the country, in the TV-movie "The Last of the Ryans" (both 1997). He continued to earn acclaim portraying true characters, winning particular attention for his work as turn-of-the-century concert pianist Percy Grainger in the biopic "Passion" (1999).
Dividing his time between stage and screen, Roxburgh began to garner attention outside of his native land with his performance as a British officer in the elegiac "The Last September" (2000), Deborah Warner's feature directorial debut about the waning influence of the Anglo-Irish classes. Following his performance as a particularly nasty henchman to Dougray Scott's primary bad guy in "Mission: Impossible 2", he undertook the role of the Duke of Monroth, who completed the romantic triangle that was the heart of Baz Luhrmann's hyperkinetic "Moulin Rouge!". Roxburgh returned home to co-star in "The One and Only" (lensed 2001) and then played opposite Michelle Yeoh and Ben Chaplin in the action adventure "The Touch" (lensed 2001-02). After essaying the tried and true role of Sherlock Holmes for a TV adaptation of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (2002) Roxburgh next took on a variation of another classic Arthur Conan Doyle character as "M" in the adventure film "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (2003), and switched over to play another icon of Victorian literature, Count Dracula, in the action-packed thriller "Van Helsing" (2004).