Russell Crowe - Biography

Biography:

Seldom does a single actor change Hollywood's perception of the perfect man, the kind of man men want to be and women just plain want. Yet Russell Crowe - a quiet, moody, hard-bitten New Zealander - appears to have done exactly that. With a mere four roles - in LA Confidential, The Insider, Gladiator, and A Beautiful Mind - he has knocked the pretty boys into a cocked hat, done away with smug, wisecracking shooters, and single-handedly forced rough-yet-sensitive masculinity back onto the agenda.

Russell Ira Crowe was born on April 7th, 1964, in Strathmore Park, a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand (he has Maori blood from his mother's side of the family and claims Norwegian ancestry too). If the surname rings a bell, that's because he's the cousin of famous cricketing brothers Martin and Jeff Crowe. The cinema was in Russell's blood. His mother's father, Stan Wemyss, was an award-winning cinematographer during World War 2, while Russell's parents - mother Jocelyn and father Alex - were set caterers (they also ran the occasional inn, one earning such a reputation for boisterousness it became known as The Flying Jug).

Due to his parents' profession and world-view, Russell's life has been fairly nomadic. His family moved to Australia when he was just four, and he didn't live in a house proper till he was fourteen. He'd receive his infant and primary education at Sydney's Vaucluse Public School. Precociously confident and fascinated by the film-sets his parents frequented, he began acting at the tender age of six. He played an orphan in the Australian TV series Spyforce, and had a part in The Young Doctors, the hit soap-opera which ran from 1976 to 1981. He'd later also appear in four episodes of Neighbours. "What really appealed," he said later was I got to punch Craig McLachlan while Kylie Minogue was on my back trying to strangle me. I thought 'If that's as close as I ever get, that'll do'."

Crowe's first real assault on the Big Time was, in fact, musical. At the age of 16, he was recast as Russ Le Roc, and released a couple of novelty singles, one having the similarly prophetic title I Want To Be Like Marlon Brando. Another, released in 1983, would be Never Let Ya Slide. When this burst of fame died out, he took on all manner of jobs to pay his way. He was entertainments manager on a resort island off of Auckland, as well as a waiter, a bartender, a fruit picker, a DJ, a horse wrangler, an insurance salesman and a bingo-number caller - in anyone's books an all-round education. But he had both the acting and the musical bugs, and worked hard to forge a career on the stage.

He'd be given his first pro role by musical director Daniel Abineri when The Rocky Horror Show toured New Zealand, between 1986 and 1988 acting in the show no fewer than 415 times. He mostly played Eddie (Meat Loaf's role in the movie version) but occasionally starred as the transvestite, transexual Frank-N-Furter (Crowe has stated that Tim Curry, again in the movie version of Rocky Horror, is his favourite screen villain). He'd also perform in Grease, Blood Brothers, Simpson J. 202, and an Official Tribute To The Blues Brothers and, again hired by Abineri, would be given the lead role in Bad Boy Johnny And The Prophets Of Doom.

. Though this combination of acting and music was fun, Crowe eventually found himself drawn towards more "serious" and challenging roles. First came Blood Oath, then the coming-of-age drama The Crossing, for which Crowe was forced to change his appearance. Having long before lost a front tooth playing rugby, he'd hitherto refused to have it fixed - until the film's frustrated director agreed to pay for the operation. Crowe's profile now began to rise with Proof (where he gave an excellent performance as a gullible young man befriended by a manipulative, and blind photographer), the comedy The Efficiency Expert (where he played alongside Anthony Hopkins, who said of Crowe "He reminds me of myself as a young actor")), and then his big breakthrough - Romper Stomper. This was a very dark slice of cinema verite, where Crowe played Hando, the head of a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads, warring with the local Asian community. Beatings were frequent and exceptionally violent, and the film caused a major furore, both in Australia and abroad.

More positively, Romper Stomper brought Crowe to the attention of Sharon Stone, then riding high after her notorious showing in Basic Instinct. Stone loved Crowe's "fearlessness" as an actor and demanded that he appear in her next picture, The Quick And The Dead, a cowboy caper to be directed by Evil Dead helmsman Sam Raimi. Indeed, she wanted Crowe so badly she held up production to allow him to finish filming his next movie, The Sum Of Us, wherein he played a homosexual coming to terms with his father and his father's new (and disapproving) girlfriend. Once finished, he went directly on to The Quick And The Dead where, as a sullen, terrifying gunslinger, he proceeded to outshine both Stone and co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. Famously, he also shared some pretty fearless sex scenes with Stone which never made the final cut. They did though appear in an uncut version of the movie, which has done more-than-brisk business in Australia.

From here on, Crowe's star rose remorselessly, his 1992 appearance on The Late Show as Shirty, The Slightly Aggressive Bear becoming an ever-more distant memory. Alongside Denzel Washington in Virtuosity, he played a man possessed by the spirits of multiple multiple-murderers. Then came the hugely acclaimed LA Confidential, where he was mightily impressive as the seedy, wholly realistic Bud White, and Mystery, Alaska where, as John Biebe, he captained a pond hockey team against the mighty New York Rangers. He's described his role in LA Confidential as his hardest yet as, in order to play the teetotal Bud White, he stopped drinking for five months and seven days (he was counting).

The rest is literally screen history with Crowe Oscar-nominated for both his next roles. First he was Jeffrey Wigand, the whistle-blowing cigarette executive in Michael Mann's The Insider (based on Marie Brenner's article the Man Who Knew Too Much). Then he was Maximus, a Roman general who becomes a gladiator after his patron, Emperor Marcus Aurelius, is murdered and he himself is betrayed by the murderer/usurper Commodus (brilliantly played by Joaquin Phoenix). For the latter, he finally won himself a little golden man. Receiving the award, he proudly bore his grandfather's MBE. He also, very deliberately, used his victory to spread hope to others, saying "If you grow up in the suburbs of anywhere, a dream like this seems kind of vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable . . . this moment is directly connected to those imaginings. And for anybody who's on the downside of advantage and relying purely on courage, it's possible".

Ridley Scott, director of Gladiator, has said of Crowe that "Russell is difficult, he has a specific mind of his own, but he is a movie star", and Crowe does have something of a reputation. He's been called bossy and demanding onset, he's said to have blown cigarette smoke at people (ooh!) and sworn at them, to have started fist-fights with other actors and even to have pulled a small pistol on a set-stylist in order to get his own way - quickly. He furthermore once walked out of an interview with the New York Post because he was "bored". And, having received a BAFTA for A Beautiful Mind, he held the head of the award ceremony's production company up against a wall for daring to cut from the show his recital of some of Patrick Kavanagh's poetry.

Crowe is very much his own man. After Gladiator, he took off on a 4000-mile motorcycle tour of Australia, with a few friends. And he admits to occasionally being TOO MUCH his own man. While filming Proof Of Life, he fell for co-star Meg Ryan, then involved in a hard divorce from Dennis Quaid. "We fell in love", he said later, "It happens, thank God. She's a magnificent person". But Russell did not make time for her and they split, with Crowe later saying "I owe her an apology for not being as flexible as I might have been".

Crowe was now one of the biggest stars alive, turning down the neat part of Wolverine in X-Men (a role taken by fellow Aussie Hugh Jackman), and receiving a hefty $15 million paycheck for his latest project, A Beautiful Mind. Here he played John Nash, a real-life mathematician at Princeton during the Cold War. Desperate to make a significant contribution to his subject and also make a success of his marriage to brilliant scientist Alicia Lardes (played by Jennifer Connelly), he's plagued by schizophrenia. Remorselessly driven by obsessive compulsions, he enters a nightmare world of paranoid visions, seeking codes in everything. His terrible condition destroys his life, yet somehow he conquers it, rekindling the flames of his broken marriage and winning the Nobel Prize. It was a heavy one, for sure, but Crowe's charisma and performance made it an unlikely $100 million hit AND both he and Connelly won Golden Globes and BAFTAs for their efforts. Both were also nominated for Oscars but, though Connelly was to triumph, Crowe was denied by Denzel Washington.

. Then it was on to the $120 million Master And Commander, culled from the popular novels of Patrick O'Brian and directed by Peter Weir. Here Crowe played Captain Jack Aubrey, the brash but sensitive sea captain greedy for victory during the Napoleonic Wars, backed once again by Paul Bettany, who'd been his imaginary friend in A Beautiful Mind and who now appeared as the pensive ship's surgeon with whom Crowe shares arguments, triumphs and chamber music sessions. Crowe would drive his crew to ever greater extremes as they hunted and were hunted by a giant French galleon off the coasts of South America and the movie was superb in its period detail and maritime wisdom, extraordinary in its action sequences - the deadly flying splinters were absolutely terrifying - and Crowe would be Golden Globe-nominated again.

The same year, 2003, would bring marriage at last. Before leaving Australia for Hollywood Crowe had spent four years in a relationship with singer and soap star Danielle Spencer, who'd appeared in The Crossing and occasionally supported his band 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts. Stardom attained, he realised that he'd made a mistake and tried to win her back. Luckily for him, she went for it, and the pair moved in to his new place in Sydney before relocating to a ranch a few hours to the north at Nana Glen, near Coffs Harbour. Here they would welcome a son, Charles (a second son, Tennyson, being born in 2006), and Crowe would prove to be a conscientious neighbour, at one point contributing $200,000 towards a new swimming-pool for local kids.

Despite a lot of pre-production work, Eucalyptus, a literary Aussie drama he was putting together with Geoffrey Rush and Nicole Kidman, fell by the wayside. So Crowe's next release would be 2005's Cinderella Man which reunited him with A Beautiful Mind director Ron Howard.

This was the real-life tale of Jim Braddock, a boxer whose broken hand sees him struggling to feed his family during the Great Depression, with Crowe exceptional as a proud man losing his dignity when seeking aid from the dole and the boxing establishment. Hard work on the docks, though, keeps him fit and eventually he gets a second chance to challenge for boxing's glittering prizes. The filming itself proved exceptionally hard work for Crowe, who suffered several concussions and cracked teeth in training. He also dislocated his shoulder - he'd experienced this injury while filming Gladiator and then again during Jodie Foster's Flora Plum, a production which then had to be shut down.

. As the innately decent Braddock, Crowe won a raft of fine reviews but Cinderella Man was not the hit the producers had hoped for. One complaint was that Crowe himself had undermined the film's publicity with an incident at a New York hotel. Having just flown in from Manchester, where he'd witnessed a bout between Ricky Hatton and Kostya Tszyu, Crowe was apparently incensed by a telephone failure as he tried to contact his family back in Oz, allegedly throwing the offending instrument at hotel worker Nestor Estrada. Crowe was arrested and tried to dampen the story by apologising and paying Estrada $100,000, but it was too late. He'd face assault charges and he'd be widely portrayed as a bully - not the smartest way to sell a movie about a good-hearted boxer. He'd later suffer more image problems when journalist Jack Marx published a long story portraying Crowe as a control freak purposefully befriending Australian hacks in order to ensure good press.

Perhaps sensibly stepping away from action roles for a time, Crowe would return in 2006 with A Good Year, directed by his Gladiator helmsman Ridley Scott and based on a novel by Peter Mayle, a former colleague of Scott in the world of advertising, renowned for popularizing the delights of Provence. Here Crowe would play an Englishman who inherits a vineyard in the region from uncle Albert Finney and intends to sell at a massive profit. Visiting the place, though, he begins to fall for its charms, and those of local bistro owner Marion Cotillard and, to keep his idyllic new life, must see off a challenge from a Californian wine brat who claims to be Finney's illegitimate daughter. A light-hearted slice of normal(ish) life, it would be a real test of Crowe's ability and comic abilities.

Having dropped out of Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia (a second missed opportunity, after Eucalyptus, to work with Nicole Kidman), Crowe would move on to 3:10 To Yuma, a remake of the classic 1957 western starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. Here Christian Bale would play an honest farmer in Arizona, crippled in the Civil War, who's struggling to get by and losing the respect of his wife and son.

In keeping with his sense of integrity, he joins a posse taking captured outlaw Crowe into town, from where he's scheduled to catch the titular train to jail and execution. In town, Bale and Crowe would be holed up in a hotel room, testing each other's wit, morals and bottle, while outside gunmen gather, hoping to either kill or rescue Crowe. With the clock ticking tensely, and Crowe and Bale superb in their verbal duelling, it would be a great western, the best in years.

. Crowe's other release of 2007 would also be impressive. This was American Gangster, a true life story that would see him directed yet again by Ridley Scott. Here former Virtuosity co-star Denzel Washington would star as a drug kingpin in 1970s New York, making a killing on pure, cheap heroin and running his outfit like a professional corporation. Crowe would be his main adversary, a cop hated by his peers for not accepting pay-offs and pushed towards retirement by a wife who fears he's made his family a target. Despite the pressure, he studies for a law degree and plods on with his investigation. Crowe would here pull his weight once more, particularly when head-to-head with Washington in their interrogation scenes, their across-the-table confrontation being as fascinating as that of another heavyweight duo, Pacino and De Niro in Heat.

2008 would see Crowe take a minor but crucial role in Tenderness. Here an 18-year-old is released from detention after having killed his parents. A young girl from a bad home becomes fixated upon him and seeks him out. She's seeking love and the tenderness of the title, he's looking for the feeling of intimacy he enjoys immediately before murder. Haunted by killings unsolved 20 years before, Crowe's a cop who suspects the boy's a psycho and is desperate to stop the girl from racing to her fate. Directing would be John Polson, an Australian who'd acted alongside Crowe in Blood Oath and The Sum Of Us.

Following this would come another reunion with Ridley Scott, Body Of Lies. Based on the novel by Washington Post writer David Ignatius, this would see Leonardo DiCaprio as an idealistic CIA agent, wounded in Iraq and now based in Jordan, who plans to eliminate a master terrorist by convincing al-Qaeda that he cannot be trusted. His plan, based on a Brit trick during WW2, involves a dead body with a false identity, but first he must convince Crowe, chief of the CIA's Near East operations, a manipulative moral pragmatist willing to sacrifice his men to get the job done. After this would come State Of Play, an adaptation of Paul Abbott's 2003 TV hit for the BBC. Here Ben Affleck would play a rising politician having an affair with young researcher Rachel McAdams. When she's killed, investigative reporter Crowe (taking John Simm's role), who earlier worked for Affleck, ties the death in with the slaying of a petty crook. Gradually a complicated web of corruption is revealed.

All that perfectionism seems to have paid off. Russell Crowe is a major Hollywood player of long standing. Yet he cannot abide Hollywood itself, preferring for years to spend his spare time either with his band or on his 560-acre farm. The farm is run in his absence by his parents and older brother Terry, who occupy the farm-house. When Russell came home, he used to live in a caravan nearby. The guy's a rough diamond. He knows what he wants, works hard to get it and possesses the talent to pull it off. He is unarguably a star.

Dominic Wills