Russell Crowe: In Print

Best Actor
Russell Crowe: A Beautiful Mind
By Jeff Gordinier
Photo by Nigel Parry
Entertainment Weekly (February 22, 2002)

Here's the conventional wisdom: Russell Crowe's performance in Gladiator was all about the physical stuff -- it was a brute-force aria of fighting and flexing and unleashing hell -- where as his work in A Beautiful Mind is all cerebral and inward. A brainiac sonata.

Bullocks. Crowe's Roman general roused the box office throng (and won him Oscar's laurel wreath last year) because the actor gave Maximus equal portions of brain and brawn. Conversely, in A Beautiful Mind, Crowe's depiction of the genius and schizophrenia of Nobel prize laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. triumphs as a physical performance. Watch his gait, the flicks of his neck and eyes, the way his hand keeps touching his head -- and then watch how these movements evolve over the course of the movie.

"This is something that Russell did a great job of executing," says director Ron Howard. "The shape of Nash's journey -- genius, madness, recovery -- is physicalized in really subtle ways. Eye contact. A certain kind of hand gesture. The way he would sit."

On set, Crowe calmed down or stirred up the tics based on Nash's state of mind at each bend in the narrative. "I really didn't have to worry about it, because he was doing a brilliant job of calibrating it," Howard says.

With three Best Actor nods in a row (The Insider, Gladiator, Mind), Crowe has slipped into the same sort of zone that Tom Hanks occupied in the mid-'90s. These are anxious times. Somehow it feels right to acknowledge an actor of such carnal vitality: Whether the battlefield is legal, military, or neurological, Russell Crowe always seems to be fighting for his life.