Insides Out - Russell Crowe
By Janine Burke / IFA
The Age (Australia, March 3, 2001)

It's probably easier to land an interview with George W Bush than Russell Crowe these days. In Melbourne to promote his new film, Proof of Life, Crowe personally vetted the list of media invited to his press conference. Minders advised me one-on-one interviews with print journalists were forbidden.

The security measures Crowe employs are an intrinsic part of Proof of Life and the relationship it triggered with co-star Meg Ryan. Crowe plays Terry Thorne, a hostage negotiator who falls for Alice (Ryan), the wife of the man he is trying to save. The media frenzy their affair sparked has probably sunk the film's chances of standing on its own merits.

At the press conference, Ryan was barely mentioned. We were too scared. Crowe, bearded and thickset, performed like a trouper - charming and playful despite appearing pale, tired and dishevelled. The camera loves Crowe who, in person, is a pretty ordinary-looking guy. The temperature changed when Crowe called Taylor Hackford, Proof of Life's director, "impolite, impolitic, idiotic and imbecilic" for saying the affair had damaged the film's chances.

For the tabloids, the Crowe-Ryan liason has meant big bucks. Woman's Day and New Idea have rivalled one another from week to week with paparazzi-style photos, gossip and rumours. The whole sorry business could affect Crowe's career, two American film critics canning his chances of an Oscar because of it. Such intense and unfair public scrutiny has a grusome fascination. Like passing an accident scene, it's hard to look away.

Woman's Day's Peter Kent is responsible for articles like "Meg's Lonely in LA - Russell's Breaking My Heart!" Kent, based in America and a former London Daily Express journalist, described a network of sources who supply him with titillating details about Crowe. 'There will be a whole posse of people watching every move he makes." And they don't do it for nothing. Many of Kent's spies work in the big LA hotels where Crowe stays. "I could fax Russell a schedule of his every movement at a certain point." Kent told me he doesn't have moral anxieties about his job. "People are entitled to know a lot more about stars' lives than they are prepared to give in an interview." Nor is the heat off Crowe, Kent believing "if he bags an Oscar, there'll be another twelve months of it."

Kent e-mailed me after I interviewed him. Crowe's US-based attorney had rung, saying he knew Kent had spoken to me. I had not discussed the interview with anyone. Kent said neither had he. He wanted to know what I had written about him before talking to his attorney. The episode made me feel weird, caught in a sticky web of suspicion and secret observation.

Crowe, an A-list movie star as well as a fine actor, does not handle the pressure like his Hollywood colleagues who mostly bear such awful intrusions with gallant good grace. Crowe is deeply and seriously pissed off. 'This whole concept that because you're famous you're public property - who the f--- thought that one up?' Crowe demanded of Sixty Minutes' Jeff McMullen. Crowe has been cast as the reckless Aussie larrikin in Tinsel Town, a rough diamond who dropped out of school and wandered into film. In fact, Crowe is a thoroughly professional, determined and ambitious actor who has relentlessly pursued the status he now commands. His talent is as strong as his need to excel, bearing fruit in Academy-award nominations for The Insider and Gladiator.

He is also the singer, songwriter, guitarist and self-described "record company executive" for Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts whose new album, Bastard Life or Clarity, has just been released. Their music is classic Australian pub band rock and roll: sweaty and funky with a country and western twang. Crowe's ballads set the band apart: haunting, passionate and sensual, they speak of the inner life, a desire for self-revelation, the need to display pain and vulnerability that mark his best performances as an actor.

To listen to Crowe's voice, torn with emotion, is to hear just how badly he wants to convey the throb of fragile, wounded feelings. Extremes suit Crowe who orchestrates the band's CDs so there is a mix of songs, a spectrum from the raw darkness of the ballads to the up-beat tempo of feel-good rock. Acting roles are similar, chosen with deliberate care so that he does repeat himself or play to type.

It is what gives performances in LA Confidential, The Insider and Gladiator their muscle: as much as Crowe embodies a very masculine strength, equally he shows helplessness, fear and confusion. He can deliver that combination in one line. He is astute at emotionally locating his characters - there is never any doubt why Bud White, Jeffrey Wigand or Maximus feel or act the way they do. He positions them on a knife edge and leaves them there, trembling. For a man who likes his privacy, Crowe is determined to show us his soul.

Crowe has spent his life on the road, a gipsy existence that began in New Zealand where his parents, Alex and Jocelyn, managed a hotel and continues as he flits between continents, moving so fast even the paparazzi can't catch him. "Home is the highway", he sings in Things Have Got to Change. Born in Wellington, his parents later worked in Australia as set caterers on the TV series Spyforce where six year old Russell, a skinny, blond-haired kid, got his first job as an extra.

Being constantly on the move can be hard on a child. There are new schools to start, new friends to make. Breaks and changes, small losses, confusions and inadequacies must be covered up to survive the next schoolyard bully, the next test. One way of coping is to create a series of flexible personae, resilient masks to confront new circumstances and hide what is troubling, building an ego that can not only deal with crisis but, apparently, thrives on it. Excellent training for an actor.

Family is at the centre of Crowe's life. He has set up his parents and older brother Terry on a lush 560 acre farm at Nana Glen, behind Coffs Harbour, the place he calls home. In effect, he has played father to his own family, providing for them in a way they were unable to for him. But, single at 36, Crowe obviously has reservations about the commitments of family life. "I panic when I see myself", he sings in She's Not Impressed, "I'm not half the man my daddy was." Life on the move is not conducive to stability. He has said recently he wants "a family and all that stuff" but for Crowe, fiercely independent, restless and adventurous, intimacy has proved elusive and settling down is not on the agenda.

Crowe's long apprenticeship was served as an extra in movies, musicals and in TV series like Neighbours, The Young Doctors and Police Rescue. Crowe was no child star and up to his mid20s, his career was played out in the shadows. Early ambitions as rock star Russ le Roq foundered, Crowe admitting his early recordings "went rocketing straight to the bottom of the charts." But, back home in New Zealand, he met Dean Cochran, with whom he would form his band, and together the two busked city streets. In 1986, Crowe joined a theatre company and for the next two years toured Australia and New Zealand performing in the chorus of Grease and The Rocky Horror Show.

In 1990, Crowe was chosen by director George Ogilvie for the lead in The Crossing. It was a transforming passage where Crowe realised his creative calling and focussed his considerable energies on film. Crowe's impact on Ogilvie was "absolutely immediate. There was a sort of hunger in Russell's eyes. Most young actors want to please. It can be a barrier. Russell didn't want to please. He wanted to be that role." Crowe "learned so quickly and always wanted criticism. He was in love with the journey." Crowe told me "my love for the journey of discovering a character has just got deeper over the years."

Just prior to The Crossing, Crowe was cast in Stephen Wallace's Blood Oath, starring Bryan Brown, about a Japanese prisoner of war trial. Wallace was prepared to give Crowe a small part until the audition when Crowe arrived with half a dozen letters his character had written home. Wallace recalls "the letters were extraordinary. He was very, very keen." Wallace then created a new role for Crowe as Brown's sidekick, Lieutenant Jack Corbett, and Brown took Crowe under his wing.

John Clarke, who both acted in Blood Oath and was its script editor, remembered Crowe's dedication. "To get fit for the part Russell would run miles and miles in ridiculous heat. We would be travelling to and from the set in vehicles and we would pass Russell, looking magnificent and bathed in sweat, pounding the roads."

Early film performances are cleanly registered, assured, whole. Crowe didn't study drama but must have found himself some good drama coaches. He still looked like a skinny kid, years younger than his age, but his ability to draw attention to a line by dropping his voice, compressing and accentuating its emotional range, was already there. So was the power of the heated emotions of rage, jealousy and sexual tension.

Crowe is skilled at repressing strong feelings, suggesting the mayhem that will erupt if they are released, then withholding them. Frustration and powerlessness are key emotions, leading critics to describe his performances as 'brooding' and 'intense'. Crowe is never better than when he isn't getting what he wants. It is must be something he is painfully familiar with because he knows just how to play it. Disappointment and rejection, two words one doesn't usually associate with Crowe, are his mirror selves. Out of such negative emotions, he creates a very human kind of courage, dignified, touching and authentic.

In 1992 Romper Stomper, where Crowe gave a wonderfully edgy performance as a neo-Nazi skinhead, lead to international attention. Sharon Stone wanted him for her western The Quick and the Dead. The film was a box office flop but it got him to Hollywood. Crowe is dismissive of Hollywood. "I have never lived there. I stay in hotels. My home is in Australia." He dubs it "Dead Loss Angeles."

Crowe's American ambitions meant the start of longer and lonelier journeys. The personal cost - solitude, alienation, infidelity and nostalgia - is recounted in songs like Danielle and Sail Those Same Oceans. While Crowe furiously rejects public talk of his private life, he's quite happy to sing about it. Crowe's need to perform, to tell the truth about himself, is stronger than the need for protection or privacy.

Proof of Life is not one of Crowe's greatest films and a list of his finest work will not include it. Even maximumcrowe.com, an unofficial fan site that assiduously records every beat of Crowe's career, panned the movie, describing it as "curiously empty" and having "little lasting impact."

A chaste and lacklustre film, poorly directed with an under-nourished script, its strangest aspect is the lack of chemistry between Crowe and Ryan. Perhaps that was happening off camera. David Morse as the kidnap victim provides the film's emotional focus. Creatively, the film is a stroll in the park for Crowe, indicating he will need to challenge the very role he has perfected: the tough man of feeling, the vulnerable hero. His biggest battles - to survive Hollywood typecasting and find fresh roles - lie ahead.

Bastard Life or Clarity signals a greater professionalism and sense of identity for Crowe's band. It is only their second full-length album in ten years of playing together. Crowe was thrilled with audience attendance at recent live concerts in Austin, Texas, where the album was recorded. But was the music the draw card? Crowe's popularity with female fans, courtesy of Gladiator, means he could stand on his head and whistle Dixie and thousands of women would be ready to drool.

Crowe's songs in Bastard Life or Clarity capture the voice of male loss and longing, an ache that fills Crowe's performances and throbs in his music. He describes the scars of wounded men and, by reference, examines his own. Memorial Day, The Night Davey hit the Train and Judas Cart honour men's sacrifices and failures. In Hold You and Somebody Else's Princess love hurts or is unrequited. Yearning for union and finding it denied is Crowe's dark version of true romance. There is no consummation, only obsession and frustration. It is Proof of Life's ending, where Crowe and Ryan bid a painful farewell, in song.

As Crowe left the press conference surrounded by a swarm of minders, he asked in a gently bewildered voice, "Where are we off to now?" Ahead are concerts in Italy, interviews in Texas and the New York shoot of a new movie. Steady as she goes, Russell.

(Article, thanks to the author)

(The following is an excerpt from an article about some of the behind-the-scenes moments at the 2000 Academy Awards ceremony.)

A Touch of Gold
Premiere (US, March 2001)
Photo: Art Streiber

Arts and Crafty

During rehearsal on Saturday, best actor nominee Russell Crowe takes it upon himself to correct an Academy over-sight. The placards that are used to mark the seats to be occupied by nominees, presenters, and notables usually sport pictures of the stars, but when Crowe takes the stage, he notices that his own placard is blank. "What, nobody sent a picture of me?" he asks before borrowing a pen and drawing a face on his card. Then he does the same for American Beauty star Wes Bentley. (The consensus is that his self portrait is significantly more attractive than his rendering of Bentley.)

Russell Crowe's Special Brand of Masculinity
By Manohla Dargis
New York Times, March 4, 2001
(Photo: by Jennifer Mitchell / New Line Cinema)

LOS ANGELES -- RUSSELL CROWE has a talent for misery. Is there anyone else this famous, outside of jail or politics, who looks this glum, this consistently? A centripetal force in muscular entertainments like "Romper Stomper," "L.A. Confidential," "The Insider" and this year's leading Academy Award contender, "Gladiator," he has made a reputation playing characters who are as likely to suffer bruising unhappiness as to dole it out. And he's done so without a hint of irony. Even when wearing a wolf skin and a skirt, and voicing a Hollywood call to battle not heard since Samson and Victor Mature, Mr. Crowe, nominated two years running for best actor, keeps a straight face. "Unleash hell" may be the war cry of Maximus, the extravagantly martyred Roman general he plays in "Gladiator," but it isn't a stretch to think it's that of Mr. Crowe as well.

Mr. Crowe, 36, has assumed a range of roles throughout his 11- year film career, from horse wrangler to sensitive plumber, but he's become famous for a procession of tough, at times brutal men, all securely out of touch with their feminine side. With a face as coiled as his fists, he has resurrected a soulful, often tragic masculinity not seen on American screens since the he-man martyr years of the 1970's, when the likes of Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and even Sylvester Stallone made a last stand for heroic masculinity, however pathological. With an equal measure of ennui and testosterone, these 70's icons gave life to wounded sons (some, predictably, Vietnam veterans) whose alienation from father and fatherland provided for gripping narratives, not to mention some unspeakable male behavior.

The second wave of feminism helped wash away these damaged men, and in their place emerged new paradigms embodied by Mr. Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford. Age and evolving audience taste would in time make relics of Mr. Stallone and Mr. Schwarzenegger's cartoon macho, while Mr. Douglas and Mr. Ford mellowed, their edge blunted. The stars who have stayed the course — Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith and that apotheosis of the eternal boy-man, Tom Hanks — remain freakishly young in look and attitude, their masculinity carefully sublimated. Even the men who actually do look and sometimes even act their age — Bruce Willis, John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson at their best, Clint Eastwood almost always — are canny enough to deliver their masculine prerogative with a knowing wink, evidence that the smartest old dogs can learn new tricks.

In this male company, Mr. Crowe isn't just an anomaly, he's an avatar — a guy who's deadly serious about being a man, whether he's reducing men to meat in "Gladiator" or taking on the tobacco industry in "The Insider" (a role for which he received his best actor Oscar nomination last year). In these and others of Mr. Crowe's films, we are far from the casual male self-parody that inflames, wittingly or not, Jerry Bruckheimer blowouts like "Armageddon," the late "Lethal Weapon" films and every feature made or inspired by Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing equivocal about the way Mr. Crowe, as Bud White in "L.A. Confidential," pounds a wife beater and, later, his own lover into the ground. Neither is there a single instance of self- reflexive jocularity in last year's rescue fantasy, "Proof of Life," in which Mr. Crowe played a "kidnap and ransom" expert who falls for the woman whose husband he's meant to save (and had an affair with his co- star, Meg Ryan). Think of it as the return of the repressed: the resurrection (yes, again) of the angry white man, this time without the Iron John drums and crocodile tears.

Born in New Zealand but moved to Australia when he was 4, Mr. Crowe, the son of movie caterers, began working in television at age 6. He acted throughout his teenage years, forming a rock band along the way, and, under the stage name Russ Le Roq, recorded a song called "I Want to Be Like Marlon Brando." He appeared onstage in "Grease" in New Zealand and "The Rocky Horror Show" in Australia, where as Dr. Frank N. Furter he donned fishnets and heels for more than 400 performances. In 1990, he was cast in his first movie, "Blood Oath," went on to a few other Australian screen roles, then a year later starred in the film that put the film industry on notice, Jocelyn Moorhouse's "Proof." The toxic love story won Mr. Crowe the first of what would become many career awards (an Australian Film Institute best supporting actor prize), but, looking back, one of the more unexpected things about the film is that his is its least exciting lead performance. As a genial dishwasher named Andy, Mr. Crowe seems cast from a different mold than his co-stars, Hugo Weaving and Geneviève Picot, who spend the film circling each other like sharks.

Although "Proof" remains one of his more admired films, revealing the actor's gift for turning reserve into something that looks like feeling, it also hints at his limitations as a performer. In the film, Mr. Crowe's character befriends Mr. Weaving's, a blind photographer, effectively loosening the emotional hold of the blind man's housekeeper and secret admirer, an unsympathetic type played within an inch of cliché by Ms. Picot.

Australian films often flaunt particularly atavistic sexual politics, but "Proof" isn't much different from any number of films that value friendships between men over those between men and women. What makes it noteworthy in Mr. Crowe's career, however, is that it's the last film in which the actor successfully played a character close to average. The last film, in other words, before he became Russell Crowe, angry man.

Given his more familiar screen presence, it's worth noting that it's Mr. Crowe who saves "Proof" from wholesale cynicism. His character's charm, his effortless smile and young man's exuberant physicality, spark against the photographer's flinty defenses, and the friendship that grows between them has a loose, sexy vibe. It isn't that the film is a covert gay love story, rather that Mr. Crowe is often most persuasively intimate when performing opposite other men. It's then that he reveals what Curtis Hanson, who directed him in one of his greatest performances, in the film "L.A. Confidential," has called his "emotional purity."

What persuaded Mr. Hanson that Mr. Crowe could play period Angeleno was "Romper Stomper," the film that made him a star in his home country. Directed by Geoffrey Wright, the film, about a violent gang of neo-Nazis, was released in 1992 to praise and condemnation. Some critics saw it as an attack on white supremacist culture; others argued that the filmmakers relished skinhead culture too enthusiastically. Considering the close regard with which the director filmed his young star, here all muscle and freaky tattoos, the latter view seems understandable. What everyone did agree on was Mr. Crowe, whose performance had reviewers reaching for that most dangerous of comparisons for new talent: Marlon Brando. Now often regulated to the cult shelves in video stores, "Romper Stomper" earned the actor still more awards, but perhaps more important, it also earned him the attention of one of Hollywood's then biggest stars, Sharon Stone.

Ms. Stone had been looking for someone to hold his own opposite her in the western "The Quick and the Dead" and lobbied on behalf of Mr. Crowe, reportedly sealing her approval with the claim that he was "the sexiest guy working in movies." More dead than quick, the genre pastiche didn't do much for Mr. Crowe except bring him to the United States. He subsequently appeared in three more duds: "Virtuosity," "Rough Magic" and "No Way Back."

Then in 1996, Mr. Hanson cast him in "L.A. Confidential," thrusting Mr. Crowe into the American imagination. Neatly distilled from the James Ellroy novel, the film tracks the violent adventures of three Los Angeles police officers, all of whom are either on the take or the hustle. Mr. Crowe's Bud White is at once the most brutal and vulnerable of the three, a raging bull with a weakness for women in peril. Dressed in boxy suits that hang forlornly off his newly thickened body, his hair cropped close, Mr. Crowe looks the image of the cop Mr. Ellroy put on the page: a violent man who, like some latter-day Atlas, shoulders a world of hurt, his own and everyone else's.

Mr. Hanson has said that when searching for an actor to play Bud White, he was thinking of the Hollywood actor Aldo Ray. An ex-Navy frogman with a heavyweight's build and a rasp of a voice that fluttered and cracked between alto and tenor, Ray took on various macho roles in the 1950's and 60's, the best of which, like Anthony Mann's masterpiece brut, "Men in War," were edged with vulnerability. A similar admixture of tough and tender defines Mr. Crowe's most memorable performances; even Hando, the skinhead antihero of "Romper Stomper," is steeped in anguish. Part of this, certainly, has to do with the roles Mr. Crowe has taken on, as well as the directors with whom he has worked, including Michael Mann on "The Insider" and Ridley Scott on "Gladiator," both partial to visions of heroic masculinity. But there is something else, too.

Mr. Crowe seems nothing if not angry, perhaps because, increasingly, the angrier the part, the better his performance. Not since the prime of Robert De Niro, the De Niro of "Mean Streats," and "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull," has another male actor made fury look the equal of emotional truth. As with Mr. De Niro, the characters that Mr. Crowe plays best come equipped with trigger tempers, a taste for primitive vengeance and impatience with most social niceties. Theirs is an extreme masculinity, a sort of maximum maleness that appears to have carried over to Mr. Crowe's personal exploits, which, from his brawls to his romantic entanglements, have provided tabloid fodder for years.

IN contrast to many movie stars, he doesn't shy from bad publicity and indeed sometimes seems to seek it out, whether he's shouting at the press or just baiting them. When a British journalist, who interviewed Mr. Crowe around the time of the release of "Romper Stomper" in Great Britain, asked the actor about the film's homoerotic subtext, the Australian replied, "Well, you'd know more about that, mate, being English." The British, in turn, have had theirs. One of the more oft-repeated stories about Mr. Crowe, which surfaced several years ago and involves the actor's reported habit of shouting out his own name during sex, has transcended industry gossip to become one of those legends that cling to the famous as part of the smog of fame. Last year, the story was the subject of a column in the British newspaper The Guardian, and even the British Film Institute's monthly magazine, Sight and Sound, has referred to the actor as "Russell `Go Russ' Crowe."

The gossip and the performances, the off- screen noise and on-screen ferocity are of a piece. The unbearable heaviness of being Russell Crowe is a gestalt, after all, a way of being and making meaning as a man. In film after better film, Mr. Crowe takes on the burdens of modern masculinity, and with each role seems to sink deeper into the ground. It's no surprise that his characters increasingly skew totemic, like those ticked off in the children's rhyme: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, skinhead, whistle blower, gladiator chief. The most memorable of these, the ones who burn up the screen with their intensity, their passion and rage, are ordinary men gutting their way through times ordinary and not, embodiments of the everyday heroes eulogized by Susan Faludi in "Stiffed," her lament for sweat and beard growth. All of which has, rather understandably, made it more and more difficult for the actor to play average.

It is a peculiar problem most recently born out by "Mystery, Alaska," the unfunny hockey comedy Mr. Crowe made between "L.A. Confidential" and "The Insider." Given little to do but skate and flog limp jokes, the actor slips into neutral as, in a terrific instance of movie miscalculation, his character, a married sheriff bereft of corpses and Grand Guignol, is forced off the ice. To bench Russell Crowe is colossal idiocy, but there's also something perversely fascinating about watching the actor look so rootless, so lost, at land and at sea at once. All he can do is wait out "Mystery, Alaska," a sidelined hero, primed for the next hot word and punch, the next chance to stand up or take the fall like a man.

Is it any wonder that Mr. Crowe's subsequent films were "The Insider," "Gladiator" and "Proof of Life"? Is it any wonder that in his next, "A Beautiful Mind," he's to play John Forbes Nash Jr., madman and Nobel Prize winner both?  

Manohla Dargis is the film editor of LA Weekly.

(Thanks to Di)