Russell Crowe

Crowe is considered by many to be one of the greatest actors of the 21st century.

Russell Ira Crowe (born 7 April 1964) is an actor.

He was born in New Zealand, spent 10 years of his childhood in Australia, and resided there permanently by age 21.

He has earned various accolades, including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award.

Crowe was born in Strathmore Park, a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, on 7 April 1964, the son of film set caterers Jocelyn Yvonne (née Wemyss) and John Alexander Crowe.

His father also managed a hotel.

His maternal grandfather, Stan Wemyss, was a cinematographer who was appointed an MBE for filming footage of World War II as a member of the New Zealand Film Unit.

Crowe is Māori, and identifies with Ngāti Porou through one of his maternal great-great-grandmothers.

His paternal grandfather, John Doubleday Crowe, was a Welsh man from Wrexham, while another of his grandparents was Scottish.

His other ancestry includes English, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish.

He is a cousin of former New Zealand national cricket captains Martin and Jeff Crowe, and the nephew of cricketer Dave Crowe.

Through his paternal grandmother, he is a direct descendant of Simon Fraser, the last man to be beheaded in Britain.

When Crowe was four years old, his family moved to Australia and settled in Sydney, where his parents pursued their career in film set catering.

His mother's godfather was the producer of the Australian TV series Spyforce, and Crowe was hired for a line of dialogue in one episode of the series at age five or six, opposite series star Jack Thompson.

In Australia, he was educated at Vaucluse Public School and Sydney Boys High School, before his family moved back to New Zealand in 1978 when he was 14.

He continued his secondary education at Auckland Grammar School, with his cousins and brother Terry, and Mount Roskill Grammar School before leaving school at the age of 16 to pursue his acting ambitions.

Under guidance from his good friend Tom Sharplin, Crowe began his performing career as a musician in the early 1980s performing under the stage name "Russ Le Roq".

He released several New Zealand singles, including "I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando", "Pier 13", and "Shattered Glass", none of which charted.

He managed an Auckland music venue called "The Venue" in 1984.

When he was 18, he was featured in A Very Special Person..., a promotional video for the theology/ministry course at Avondale University, a Seventh-day Adventist tertiary education provider in New South Wales, Australia.

Crowe left New Zealand and returned to Australia at the age of 21, intending to apply to the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

He said, "I was working in a theatre show, and talked to a guy who was then the head of technical support at NIDA. I asked him what he thought about me spending three years at NIDA. He told me it'd be a waste of time. He said, 'You already do the things you go there to learn, and you've been doing it for most of your life, so there's nothing to teach you but bad habits.'" From 1986 to 1988, he was given his first professional role by director Daniel Abineri, in a New Zealand production of The Rocky Horror Show.

He played the role of Eddie/Dr Scott.

He repeated this performance in a further Australian production of the show, which also toured New Zealand.

In 1987, Crowe spent six months busking when he could not find other work.

In the 1988 Australian production of Blood Brothers, Crowe played the role of Mickey.

He was also cast again by Daniel Abineri in the role of Johnny, in the stage musical Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom in 1989.

Crowe began acting in Australia and had his breakout role in the drama Romper Stomper (1992).

Later, in 1994, Thompson would play the supportive father of Crowe's gay character in The Sum of Us.

Crowe also appeared briefly in the serial The Young Doctors.

He gained international recognition for his starring roles as a police detective in the thriller L.A. Confidential (1997) and Jeffrey Wigand in the drama The Insider (1999).

Crowe gained wider stardom for playing the title role in the period film Gladiator (2000), winning the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Further acclaim came for portraying mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. in the biopic A Beautiful Mind (2001).

He has since starred in the war film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), the sports drama Cinderella Man (2005), the Western 3:10 to Yuma (2007), the crime drama American Gangster (2007), the thriller State of Play (2009), and the action film Robin Hood (2010).

He has been the co-owner of the National Rugby League (NRL) team South Sydney Rabbitohs since 2006.

in 2012, Crowe starred as Javert in the musical Les Misérables. Unlike many of his other roles, his performance in this film was widely panned by critics.

One described his singing as “[https://celesteheadlee.com/russell-crowe-and-the-myth-that-everyone-can-sing/ … awful.

On a purely technical level, it’s laughable; on an aesthetic level, it’s horrendous.]” Another reviewer wrote, “I would rather wash the dishes or empty the trash than watch Crowe ruin Javert.”

Later, Crowe appeared as Jor-El in the superhero film Man of Steel (2013), as Noah in the biblical drama Noah (2014), and as Zeus in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Thor: Love and Thunder (2022).

In 2014, he made his directorial debut with the drama The Water Diviner, in which he also starred.