Russell Crowe

Long before he was Maximus Decimus Meridius, Russell Crowe was Russ Le Roq, a quiffed Auckland teenager putting out his own singles with titles like 'I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando'. Hardly anyone bought them, but the ambition was already there. He was born in Wellington on 7 April 1964 to Alex and Jocelyn Crowe, a couple who ran catering trucks on New Zealand film sets, and his grandfather Stan Wemyss was a cameraman decorated with an MBE for his Second World War footage. The trade, in one form or another, was already in the house.

The family moved to Sydney when he was four, and at six he turned up as a child extra on the series 'Spyforce', which starred Jack Thompson. At fourteen he went back to New Zealand, attended Auckland Grammar School, the same school as his cousins Martin and Jeff Crowe, both future captains of the national cricket side, and walked out at sixteen to chase a music career. He would drift back to Australian television later on, in 'The Young Doctors' and four episodes of 'Neighbours'.

For years he played pubs, ran a music venue in Auckland and took whatever work paid the rent. His first proper acting job came in 1986 on a touring production of 'The Rocky Horror Show' directed by Daniel Abineri, who later cast him as Mickey in the first Australian staging of 'Blood Brothers' in 1988 and then handed him the title role in 'Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom'. Those stages, not a drama school, were his entire training.

Hando, the role that changed everything

Australian cinema took him in quickly. His debuts came with 'Prisoners of the Sun' (1990) and 'The Crossing', and in 1991 he won the AFI Award for Best Supporting Actor for 'Proof', playing the dishwasher who befriends a blind photographer played by Hugo Weaving. A year later came 'Romper Stomper', a savage portrait of Melbourne's skinhead scene. Hando earned him the AFI Award for Best Actor and a reputation as a genuinely dangerous screen presence that crossed the Pacific within months.

Before he left for good he made 'The Sum of Us' (1994) as a gay plumber sharing a house with his dad, Jack Thompson again. It was Sharon Stone who, having watched 'Romper Stomper', fought the studio to get him cast in the western The Quick and the Dead (1995). That was the ticket to Hollywood, though it took another two years to find the right part.

Three years, three Oscar nominations

That part came from Curtis Hanson, who on L.A. Confidential (1997) had the nerve to surround Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger with two Australians nobody had heard of: Crowe and Guy Pearce. His Bud White, a brawler with an unexpected streak of decency, landed so well that the name stuck across the industry.

Then came The Insider (1999) for Michael Mann. Two and a half stone heavier and with his hair greyed, he disappeared into Jeffrey Wigand, a chemist more than twenty years his senior who blew the whistle on the tobacco industry. It brought his first Academy Award nomination and proved there was a lot more to him than physical presence.

In 2000, Ridley Scott put a sword in his hand. Gladiator shot with a half finished script, daily rewrites and a leading man who argued about most of his lines, and the opening battle in Germania was actually filmed in Bourne Wood, just outside Farnham in Surrey. None of the chaos showed. The film took five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Crowe, and "Are you not entertained?" is still the line strangers shout at him more than twenty five years on.

He did it again the following year with A Beautiful Mind (2001), playing the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash for Ron Howard. That one brought the Golden Globe, the SAG Award and the BAFTA for Best Actor, and became the first performer to lead two consecutive Best Picture winners since Walter Pidgeon. The Oscar that year went to Denzel Washington for 'Training Day'.

Plenty of people blamed his temper for that. At the BAFTA after party in February 2002 he confronted television producer Malcolm Gerrie because the BBC had cut the Patrick Kavanagh poem he recited while collecting his award. The row leaked while Academy voting was still open. Crowe later admitted he had been "more passionate" about it than he should have been, though he never took back a word of what he said.

Captain, boxer and sheriff

The following decade confirmed him as a movie star of the old school, the sort who can carry a big film aimed squarely at grown ups. He was Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Peter Weir's adaptation of Patrick O'Brian's novels, and boxer James J. Braddock in Cinderella Man (2005), working with Ron Howard again.

There were also five films with Ridley Scott: A Good Year (2006), American Gangster (2007) opposite Denzel Washington, Body of Lies (2008), State of Play (2009), adapted from the BBC thriller, and Robin Hood (2010), which opened Cannes and gave him a Nottinghamshire accent that critics argued about for months. In between he squared up to Christian Bale in 3:10 to Yuma (2007), directed by James Mangold.

It was also the era of headlines he didn't want. In June 2005, at the Mercer Hotel in New York, he threw a telephone at a concierge while trying to call his wife in Australia. Crowe pleaded guilty to third degree assault, left court with a conditional discharge and settled privately with the employee. The short fuse label followed him for years.

Two roles he turned down, oddly enough, made a fellow Australian very rich. Aragorn in 'The Lord of the Rings' and Wolverine in 'X-Men' both went past him, and he recommended Hugh Jackman for the latter. Jackman has thanked him for it in public more than once.

Behind the camera and away from it

In 2012 he sang his way through Les Misérables, shot largely at Pinewood and around southern England, playing Javert opposite Jackman and Anne Hathaway. His voice split the critics and he has never pretended it was an easy job. Next came Jor-El in Man of Steel (2013) for Zack Snyder and Tubal-Cain in Noah (2014), directed by Darren Aronofsky.

That same year he stepped behind the camera for the first time with The Water Diviner, about an Australian farmer who travels to Gallipoli after the First World War to bring home the bodies of his three sons. It shared the AACTA Award for Best Film with 'The Babadook', the first time Australia's top film prize had ended in a tie. He directed himself again on Poker Face (2022), which he also wrote.

Somewhere in there he made a shambolic buddy comedy that has since built a proper cult following, The Nice Guys (2016), pairing him with Ryan Gosling under Shane Black. Then in 2019 he vanished under prosthetics to play Fox News founder Roger Ailes in The Loudest Voice. It won him a second Golden Globe in January 2020, which he didn't collect: he stayed in Australia because of the bushfires, and Jennifer Aniston read out his statement on climate change from the stage.

Away from film, in 2006 he bought 75% of rugby league club South Sydney Rabbitohs with businessman Peter Holmes à Court. Crowe got heavily involved in recruitment, the club won its first NRL premiership in 43 years in 2014, and he still holds a quarter of the ownership. Music never went away either: after 30 Odd Foot of Grunts he formed Indoor Garden Party in 2017 and still tours with them.

His private life revolves around a property at Nana Glen, near Coffs Harbour, that he bought in the nineties. It was there that he married Australian actress and singer Danielle Spencer on 7 April 2003, his 39th birthday. They had two sons, Charles in 2003 and Tennyson in 2006, separated in 2012, and the divorce wasn't finalised until April 2018. To divide things up he auctioned off a huge chunk of his memorabilia in a sale he called 'The Art of Divorce'.

Since 2020 he has been with the American estate agent and occasional actress Britney Theriot, whom he first met on the set of Broken City. He has ruled out marrying again, saying he likes the relationship exactly as it is. To this day he remains a New Zealand citizen and an Australian resident, which didn't stop the Royal Australian Navy handing him the honorary rank of Commander aboard HMAS Sydney in February 2026. Twenty three years after 'Master and Commander', Captain Aubrey finally had the stripes.

The veteran

Past sixty, he works harder than ever and worries far less about dignity. There has been a camp Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) for Taika Waititi, then a Vatican exorcist with a thick Italian accent in The Pope's Exorcist (2023) and the hunter's father in Kraven the Hunter (2024).

His most admired recent work is Nuremberg (2025), directed by James Vanderbilt, in which he builds a Hermann Göring who is charming and monstrous in equal measure across a long psychological duel with the army psychiatrist played by Rami Malek. In 2026 he has released Beast, a mixed martial arts drama he co wrote and in which he plays the old coach opposite Luke Hemsworth, and the thriller The Get Out with Teresa Palmer, Nina Dobrev and Luke Evans.

He sat out Gladiator II (2024) for the obvious reason that Maximus dies at the end of the first one, and he hasn't been shy about the sequel either, saying it missed the "moral core" of the character and that nobody involved ever rang him. That's Crowe all over. Four decades into the job he still says precisely what he thinks, and the mix of raw talent and total lack of filter is probably why he's so hard to mistake for anyone else.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Russell Crowe is The Quick and the Dead (1995); in all, 46 films and 1 TV show over 31 years. They have worked as actor in 47, producer in 3, director in 2 and writer in 2. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Man of Steel (2013), with 179 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2020s, with 17 titles. The person they have worked with most is Ridley Scott, on 5 films, among them Gladiator and Robin Hood.