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Blockbuster.co.uk's Marshall Julius casts an eye over the tempestuous private life and heavyweight professional career of 3:10 to Yuma star Russell Crowe.
A whip-cracking, rip-roaring, gun-blasting western with a rough, tough cast of Hollywood heavyweights, 3:10 to Yuma stars Russell Crowe as black-hearted desperado Ben Wade and Christian Bale as struggling rancher Dan Evans, motivated by financial concerns to deliver the recently captured Wade to justice. All Dan has to do is get Wade on the 3:10 train to Yuma, where he'll be sentenced and executed without delay. Obviously, things get complicated, fast. Violent too, yet as time passes the men develop a grudging respect for one another, so it's not only a taut, exciting action thriller, it's got a bit of depth too.
Based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, and directed by Walk The Line's James Mangold, of primary concern during the pre-production stages was finding the right man to play archetypal western villain Ben Wade. "It was important to convey that sense of masculinity, power and capability, which is intrinsic to the western," says Mangold. With that in mind, Oscar-winner Russell Crowe was a natural choice for the cunning, charismatic bad guy. "Russell was who we always thought of for Wade, and he brings a clean, crisp, masculine commitment to the role. It's hard to make that leap into period films and figure out how to be yourself in them and somehow not bring down the scenery and the façade of that world. And Russell truly is himself in L.A. Confidential, Gladiator and 3:10 to Yuma, yet at the same time he's completely true to the period."
For Crowe, accepting the part was an easy decision. "I'd wanted to work with Jim for a while and there was a basic energy to the Ben Wade character that I liked," he explains. Wade is a man of implacable resolve and lightning judgment. A man who does him wrong can expect no mercy. Crowe believes his character's stern perspective is hard earned and colors his every action. "There's a scene where Wade discusses a time when he read the Bible from cover to cover, and the reasons why he read the Bible from cover to cover. That, to me, is the central core of who Ben is. It wasn't a very pleasant experience for him when he read the Bible cover to cover, and I kind of took the attitude that he doesn't believe in a benevolent God. He got stuck somewhere in the Old Testament, and hasn't come out of there yet."
Russell Ira Crowe was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on April 7, 1964. When he was four years old, Russ and his family moved to Australia where his parents, John and Jocelyn, pursued their dream career providing catering for film sets. When Crowe was five or six, he was hired to deliver a line of dialogue in an episode of Australian TV series Spyforce. Possibly because of his burgeoning star quality, or maybe because the programme was produced by his mum's godfather, but either way, Russ was hooked. Stardom was definitely for him.
When he was 14, Crowe and his family moved back to New Zealand, and it was there, in the mid-Eighties, that Russell performed as rock 'n' roll revivalist Russ Le Roq, releasing the tellingly-titled single I Wanna Be Marlon Brando, though later he admitted that back when he wrote and recorded the song, he hadn't seen a single Brando movie. Sadly for Crowe, the song did him no favours, and he was reduced to busking in 1987. Eventually, somehow, Crowe came to the attention of British musical director/writer Daniel Abineri, who gave Russ his first professional acting role in a New Zealand tour of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Abineri later awarded Crowe the title role in his first stage musical, Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom, which premiered in Melbourne in 1989.
Following an obligatory early appearance in soap legend Neighbours, to name just one of his many minor telly gigs, Crowe landed his first feature, The Crossing (1990), a small-town love triangle directed by George Ogilvie. In 1992, Crowe delivered his first scene-stealing performance, in Romper Stomper, a violent and uncompromising Australian drama detailing the exploits and downfall of a racist skinhead group in blue-collar suburban Melbourne. Earning the respect of critics and the attention of US studio bosses, Crowe flew the coop and headed to the States to be a star. 1995's Virtuosity, a sci-fi shoot-'em-up with techno baddie Russ gunning for hero Denzel Washington, wasn't the greatest start, but it wasn't long before bigger, better offers started heading his way.
Case in point, Curtis Hanson's Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential (1997), a noir-ish crime thriller casting Crowe as renegade cop Bud White. "The most painful part of playing Bud," reveals Crowe, "was that the author, James Ellroy, kept telling me he wasn't a drinker. I said, 'come on, this is 1953. He's a blue-collar bloke, a cop. You're telling me he doesn't sit around with the boys after his shift and have a beer?' And Ellroy says, 'absolutely not'. So for five months and seven days, I didn't have a drink. It was probably the most painful period of my life."
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Although Russ won Best Actor at the BAFTAs for A Beautiful Mind, he lost the Oscar to Training Day's Denzel Washington. It was suggested at the time, and often since, that Crowe's attack on BAFTA TV producer Malcolm Gerrie may have turned voters against him. When part of Crowe's appearance at the 2002 BAFTA awards was cut out to fit into the BBC's tape-delayed broadcast, Crowe swore like a sailor during an argument with Gerrie. The part cut was a poem in tribute to actor Richard Harris who was then terminally ill, and was cut for copyright reasons. Crowe later apologized, saying "What I said to him may have been a little bit more passionate than how, in the cold light of day, I would have liked it to have been."
In June 2005, Crowe was arrested and charged with second degree assault by New York cops after he threw a telephone at an employee of the Mercer Hotel for refusing to help him place a call when the system didn't work from his room, and was charged with fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, namely the telephone. The employee, a concierge, was treated for a facial laceration. Crowe described the incident as "possibly the most shameful situation that I've ever gotten myself in... and I've done some pretty dumb things in my life." He was sentenced to conditional release, and paid $100,000 to settle a civil lawsuit out of court.
Crowe's stormy temperament was scathingly parodied in a sixth-season episode of South Park called The New Terrance and Phillip Movie Trailer, where Crowe appears as the star of his own, fictional TV series named Russell Crowe: Fightin' Around the World, in which the scrapping star travels the globe in search of foreign strangers to pick on. "All that stuff, this public persona of me - let's call him 'the wild man' - that is not helpful," stresses Crowe. "It doesn't make me more of a box office draw. It's the quality of my work that makes people want to go to my films." That's true, but it's his bad behaviour that made us buy the tabloids.
Besides the movies and the fighting there's Crowe's music, I suppose, but no one's ever paid much attention to that. Though he keeps on trying, bless him, in bands like 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts and The Ordinary Fear of God, as a musician he lacks the appeal he has as a movie star. Boo hoo for him. I guess he'll just have to get by on those $20 million salaries. As it happens, according to Forbes, Crowe's movies average just $5 of gross income for every dollar he gets paid, making him the most overpaid celebrity in the business. Certainly his bank balance must make him happy.
Following a torrid, tedious affair with Proof of Life co-star Meg Ryan in 2000, in 2003 Crowe married Australian singer and actress Danielle Spencer, who he met while filming The Crossing back in 1990. Together the couple have two sons, Charles "Charlie" Spencer Crowe (born 21/12/03) and Tennyson Spencer Crowe (born 7/7/06). When he's not hard at work making movies like Cinderella Man and American Gangster, he lives a relatively quiet life in Australia, with a home in Sydney at the end of the Finger Wharf in Woolloomooloo, and also a 320-hectare rural property in Nana Glen near Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. Says the star, "I'd move to Los Angeles if Australia and New Zealand were swallowed up by a huge tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in Europe, and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack." Fingers crossed, it won't come to that.
Ultimately, after a full life of making blockbuster movies, recording obscure albums and shouting at strangers, Crowe plans to donate his brain to medical science. Maybe he does have a beautiful mind. Before it ends up in a jar though, let's enjoy it in its rightful home, inside Russell Crowe's head, which is where the magic happens.
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