January 27

Source: The Daily Telegraph

January 27, 2002

A beautiful role
By Lawrie Masterson

Somewhere on Manhattan's East 92nd St, a homeless man regularly holds conversations with imaginary friends, berating them because no-one ever helps him with his chores. If Australian actor Russell Crowe wins his second consecutive Academy Award as Best Actor, that man may well figure in his acceptance speech.

If he does win, Crowe would become the first actor to walk away with back-to-back Academy Awards since Tom Hanks for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump the following year.

His Golden Globe Award at the weekend for A Beautiful Mind now makes him an even hotter Oscar favourite than he was for Gladiator last year.

Certainly, Crowe is odds-on to gain his third consecutive nomination after Gladiator and 1999's The Insider. His performance in A Beautiful Mind, the story of tortured mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr, prompted the film's director, Ron Howard, to describe him as "in the realm of our elite film actors".

Nash, a Nobel Prize winner and a genius among brilliant minds at Princeton University in the 1940s and 1950s, had a devastating decline as a paranoid schizophrenic who was repeatedly hospitalised against his will.

Crowe, 37, used the homeless man, and a few other lost souls who live on the streets of Manhattan, as research for the role.

The real Nash is now 72 and continues to work at Princeton, but Crowe chose not to meet him until after he completed the film, to be released in Australia on February 28.

"I didn't feel Nash, as he exists now, was a true template of Nash, the young man," Crowe says.

"There are a lot of reasons for that, but mainly they centre on 35 years of medication and hospitalisation, and the effect that the disease schizophrenia has.

"I was talking to this lady from the New York Times, and she asked me about research and I said, 'I'm living in Manhattan. I just go for a walk every Sunday'. And even though that was supposed to be a witticism, there was also a lot of truth behind it.

"The reality in this country and in most western civilisations (is) with the advent of psych drugs the percentage of people who are kept in a hospital facility because of mental illness has dropped.

"If you're wondering about that person you see having a conversation with himself at a crosswalk, you are more than likely seeing some level of schizophrenic or psychotic episode and there were certain people in Manhattan that I would go and visit regularly."

The man on East 92nd Street became a particular favourite as Crowe put together the jigsaw puzzle that became his screen portrayal of Nash, whose bouts of delusion at times were only marginally more startling than his arrogance towards colleagues "I don't like people much," he says at one point and blatantly direct approaches to women.

Asked whether he could draw comparisons between Nash and himself in those latter respects, Crowe scoffs at the question as being "like a fucking 40 foot carriage train coming down the track.

"He (Nash) says that people don't like him and he's a little arrogant, what about you? Fuck me! It's a funny thing about this world if you do have self-belief, particularly if it's actually based on something, you do become a target for people if you're prepared to stand up for yourself.

"Anyway, just as I am not a Roman general, I am also not a schizophrenic mathematician. Moving right along ..."

Crowe also quashes rumours linking him romantically to Australian actress Nicole Kidman, recently divorced from American star Tom Cruise and also among the big contingent of Australian winners at this year's Golden Globes, presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Remarking that "I've never in my life got on a plane to go on a holiday," Crowe adds: "Now, some of you will will say, 'Oh, weren't you in Fiji last year?'. I was in Fiji on a refueling stop on an aeroplane, you know, but, of course, while I was there I had time to have a romance with somebody else. Whatever you guys want to write, you know."

Returning to the subject later, he laughs and says: "Yes, I did see my very good friend Nicole Kidman and I am not implying anything by using the phrase 'refueling stop'. I just wanted to absolutely clarify that.

"Nicole's a really good friend of mine, has been for 10 years and I hope for the next 100 or however long we last. There you go."

Crowe, by the way, attended the Golden Globes with Australian actress Danielle Spencer, with whom he has been an on-again, off-again item for several years. The two kissed warmly when Crowe was announced winner of the Best Actor (Drama) category. And Crowe set the Hollywood pack ablaze when he mischievously let loose that he was "in love" again with "an old friend". The assumption assumption only, mind you is that the Crowe-Spencer relationship IS on again.

Back to the more serious business of acting. In a separate interview, director Ron Howard says Crowe "fills the criteria of everything I hope for in an actor playing a leading role."

Howard adds: "He's creatively ambitious; he's got great ideas. However outspoken he might be, and he can be kind of loud and boisterous, he still listens.

"He's responsive and at the end of the day when you're in the editing room the range of choices, the subtlety and the detail that he brings to a character are really invaluable. I really hope I get to make another film with Russell."

Backstage at the Golden Globes, Crowe was coy when asked about his next film, but it is likely to be another true story, The Cinderella Man, about boxer Jim Braddock, who became a Depression era world champion. It is unlikely to start filming before July, with Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom (The Cider House Rules, The Shipping News) at the helm.

"It's not really a boxing film," Crowe says. "It's not going to be something that competes with Raging Bull or Ali. It's really about this fellow's family and the relationships within the family, as to what gave him strength I suppose."

Crowe says he does not want to rush into the film.

"I think that's the major difference in what life is going to be like for the next 12 months. I'm just trying to sort of step back and prune a few things and also not have that situation where I'm in production while marketing another movie, which has basically been the last three years.

"It's not healthy, so the deal I've done for the next movie is predicated on the fact that I start my preparation for that film after I've been around the world talking about A Beautiful Mind."

Also in a separate interview, Hallstrom says he would not have agreed to direct The Cinderella Man unless Crowe signed on.

"This is the one and only actor I think who can do that part," Hallstrom says. "Right here and right now he is the perfect match for the character for a variety of reasons.

"He is just one of those actors who is so authentic and starts from an emotional place and rings so true in everything he does.

"He is the only actor I can imagine making the film."

Source: The Independent (UK)

January 27, 2002

Russell Crowe: Don't mess with the man in the leather skirt

His edgy acting style is wowing Hollywood and he's in line for his second 'best actor' Oscar. But he couldn't give a damn - he'd much prefer a beer.

He will be a week short of his 38th birthday when the Oscars come round at the end of March, and he still carries himself with a steadfast lack of charisma that you might expect in an electrician or a manual labourer on a movie set. But Russell Ira Crowe could easily grab his second Best Actor Oscar by the throat, mutter a few brusque words, and stroll away for several relieving beers.

The only actors who have ever done it twice in a row before are Tom Hanks, with Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, and Spencer Tracy back in the 1930s with Captains Courageous and Boys Town. Yet even the great Tracy begins to feel decidedly limited next to the expansiveness of Crowe.

Sure, Tracy could have played Bud White in L.A. Confidential (Crowe's break-out picture from 1997). Tracy could have managed the uneducated, rather brutalised emotional life in the city cop who gets the dirty jobs, but who still has a heart that can be broken. And I can just about believe that Tracy could have put on close to 50lbs and 20 years and turned himself into the paranoid, edgy, muddled whistle-blower, Jeffrey Wigand, for The Insider. I can even accept that Tracy could have become the hard-bitten professional negotiator for Proof of Life, and then so wowed his co-star Meg Ryan on location that her long-term marriage to Dennis Quaid was history before the film was over. After all, the rough edge in Tracy made him very attractive to women they wanted to look after him.

But don't tell me that Spencer Tracy could have put on leather skirts and turned himself into the Roman general, Maximus, for Gladiator (Crowe's first Oscar success). One reason that Gladiator did so well was the utter conviction and muscle-power that Crowe brought to all those scenes of action. Indeed, in that one film he had put himself in the company of the screen's great athletes people like Burt Lancaster, Errol Flynn, and even John Wayne.

So consider the audacity and the artistic ambition in this deliberately rough-mannered Antipodean that in his next film, A Beautiful Mind, which is this year's contender, he should be playing John Nash, mathematical genius, arrogant nerd, schizophrenic, break-down case and Nobel Prize winner. Last week Crowe won the Best Actor Golden Globe for A Beautiful Mind. So, to put it bluntly, in not much more than a year this guy has whipped both a large tiger and some of the most fiendish equations you're ever going to see in a motion picture.

We have seen chameleon actors before, of course, but the chameleon is so brilliantly versatile you have no doubts about its intentions it wants to conquer the world. Russell Crowe has another attribute that both charms and bewilders Hollywood. Like the classic guy from Down Under, he's very happy to display his lack of education or couthness, his general disdain for all lifestyles and philosophies formed beyond Australia or New Zealand, and his merry, insolent scorn for the way things are done in Hollywood.

"I'd move to Los Angeles if Australia and New Zealand were swallowed up in a huge tidal wave," he once allowed grudgingly. "If there were a bubonic plague in England, and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack. In Australia, they treat you like a piece of furniture. Your mates are your mates and the folks who hate your dark and bloody guts, they don't change their minds. That's why I love it, I suppose."

In other words, Hollywood is all very well, and two Oscars in a row would be sweet like the salary level of close to $20m (14m) a picture. But if you get down to essential realities, how many people in the Oscar theatre will know, or know how to rate it, that he is a cousin of the former New Zealand cricket captain, Martin Crowe?

In the wave of Antipodean talent that could break at these Oscars (with Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett all in contention, and with the careers of Mel Gibson, Geoffrey Rush, Heath Ledger, Guy Pearce and Hugh Jackman all being talked about), it's important to stress that Crowe has both Australian and New Zealand links. He was actually born in Wellington on 7 April 1964, and he has primary New Zealand citizenship. He even claims a fraction of Maori blood, as well as Irish and Norwegian ancestry.

His childhood was split between Australia and New Zealand because his parents ran a catering business that worked for movies in production. So the kid spent as much time collecting paper plates as he did in school. It was that hanging around on sets that got him his first acting job, aged seven, as Orphan in a TV series called Spyforce, and then a teenage role in the TV series Neighbours. He played some rugby and he still has an abiding passion to be a rock singer: for a while, he was Russ Le Roc, with a single record, "I Want to Be Like Marlon Brando".

Still, by the early 1990s, he was drawing a lot of attention in Australia as an actor as a racist skinhead in Romper Stomper. That movie was seen in America and no less than Sharon Stone urged him to take a part in her spoof western, The Quick and the Dead. That was 1995, and a supporting part in Denzel Washington's Virtuosity was the one more step he needed on the way to L.A. Confidential.

Aiming yourself at Marlon Brando is a tricky business not just because there are never enough good roles to meet the range of Brando's talent, but because Brando's strange "integrity" can easily make an actor a professional outcast in the picture business. For the moment, Crowe has Hollywood off-balance: he can do so much. He has such intense discipline, and yet he seems so unimpressed by Hollywood's rewards. He went through that tough regime to make himself Jeffrey Wigand, and then he took the weight off to be Maximus without complaint. His absorption in the role of John Nash startled and frightened other people on the set.

But then, as he relaxes, Crowe is likely to be gone back to Australia, doing motor-bike tours of the Outback or just hanging out at his farm on the wilder shores of New South Wales. Crowe is resolutely unmarried, a known guy with the ladies. He earned a certain respect at the way he seemed to inhale Meg Ryan a popular, very American figure but then he lost interest in his conquest because she didn't want to spend endless days on the farm counting the beers. He is, as yet, a defiantly un-Hollywood figure, yet the town is reckoning with the need to see him as maybe the best actor in sight. It's a tricky situation, and no one doubts Rusty's ability to pick a fight.

With two Oscars in a row, he would be offered just about anything anyone wants to make. He might put more time into his own attempts to write scripts. He could become a very grand figure or he might find that image too ridiculous to tolerate. Marlon Brando's lesson for all actors is that the better you are the shorter your honeymoon in the business. Somehow, I doubt that anything is going to tame Crowe or turn him towards obedience. Look for explosions.