The role that became a “personal quest” for Russell Crowe: “I liked who he was”
In the late 1990s and at the start of the new millennium, there was widespread opinion that Russell Crowe was probably the best actor in the world.
Thanks to movies including Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, Crowe was one of the highest-paid and most in-demand leading men for decades, before it started to head downhill, fast.
His profile went astronomic initially due to the Oscar-winning noir LA Confidential, in which Crowe came seemingly from nowhere alongside fellow antipodean actor Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey to gain serious global acclaim for his role as a 1950s LAPD officer, the movie picking up nine Academy Award nominations and winning for ‘Best Screenplay’.
He followed it up with more success a couple of years later opposite Al Pacino in The Insider, Michael Mann’s searing expose about corruption in the tobacco industry that earned him his first Oscar nomination for ‘Best Actor’. He then went one better in the role that really defined the peak of his career, Ridley Scott’s awe-inspiring Gladiator in 2000, which earned him the top honours and secured him a $15m salary for his next film, A Beautiful Mind.
Once again, his performance in the biographical drama was stellar, and he made it three ‘Best Actor’ Oscar nominations in as many years, a feat matched only by the likes of Jack Nicholson, Pacino and Marlon Brando. By now, Crowe was seemingly unassailable as he signed on for another blockbuster, 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and then another movie with Ron Howard, the boxing biopic Cinderella Man, which told the story of the heavyweight boxing champion James J Braddock.
Crowe was aware of the film’s script years before production started, but wasn’t offered the role until he had achieved Oscar success with Gladiator. He said of the part: “It became a personal quest for me, you know, that his (Braddock’s) legacy was respected. Because here’s a guy that I liked him before he was a champion; I liked who he was when he was a champion; I liked who he was and what he did after he was a champion.”
Braddock was an Irish-American boxer from New Jersey who earned the nickname ‘Cinderella Man’ thanks to an unlikely comeback from retirement culminating in a World Heavyweight Championship win in the 1930s. Braddock had experienced severe poverty and worked on the docks during America’s Great Depression.
Crowe also suffered physically in order to take the role on; he lost more than 40 pounds in weight and a dislocated shoulder. The actor said after filming: “It was … the hardest training I’ve ever done, and I’m over 40 now, so it was probably the wrong time to start, you know. And there’s a lot of old war wounds that came back … because as we know, I’ve been on the battlefield since 185 AD.”
In the background of the 2005 movie, however, trouble was brewing for Crowe. His arrest and charging for second-degree assault on a hotel concierge in New York was an event from which his career nosedived and never really recovered, at least not to the levels he had enjoyed previously.
It was not the first time Crowe had found himself in hot water in public, and it wasn’t the last either, although the actor said that the incident changed him completely as a person. Over the past ten to 15 years, Crowe has been in a mixture of lower-budget features, with the occasional breakthrough like The Nice Guys and Unhinged.
His most recent major role was earlier this year, as he played Hermann Goring in James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg. The historical thriller was well reviewed and was a particular hit with audiences.
