As an actor, Russel Crowe is often amazing and magnificent creature to watch. Attractive. Complex. Subtle. Watching him slip inside a role is a matter not of forgiving butt of forgetting all the tabloid baggage. The lout of a thousand headlines vanishes, and the superb film actor appears magically in his place. When he is at the helm of a movie, we’re proud to sail with him. Like in “Master Command”, the film in that he was directed by Peter Weir, one of his real heroes.

So far, Crowe share his gifts with other Australian-bred stars, from Nicole Kidman and Mel Gibson to Hugh Jackman., who have lately taken in over Hollywood. But he has something than agreeable presence and technical precision than everybody. He can convey inner strength, rage and desperation whitout ever pushing it.

Acting for Crowe is the synthesis of two passions: he loves performing, and he also approaches each role as a chance to design his own curriculum and make up for his lost higher education. For example, to play Master and Commander’s Jack Aubrey, he spent months learning the violin and studying the linguistic origins of his character’s accent.
Russell Crowe is not a Method actor (“I work between ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’), but he does take his preparatory obsessiveness to the set.

On the first day of Master and Commander, he handed out three shirts to each cast member and ordered them to return in 24 hours with name tags sewn on them as a way of getting them used to taking orders from him. “It was kind of done with a wink”, says co-star Billy Boyd, who plays a coxwain in Master and Commander.

Crowe says in a recent interview he does this kind of thing a lot and that it is part of his “work on behalf of the character”, but some directors have complained about his free-lancing.

“On a Beautiful Mind he was intensely adamant about expressing himself and trying his ideas, and if you tried to squelch them he’d resent the hell out of it”, comments Ron Howard, director of that movie, who will work with Crowe again on the next year’s The Cinderella Man, a boxing movie.

Russel Crowe has been working as an actor since age 6, when his father, a hotel manager and film-set caterer, got him a job on a TV show.

“I didn’t work continuously when I was a young fella, just little bits and pieces”, he says, “enough to formulate the desire. And I was never a child star, just a child extra, so I was learning and observing without pressure”.

After school, Crowe wanted to attend college to study history. But his father was out of work, so instead he hit the market and got jobs in repertory productions of plays like Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sang in a moderately successful band, Roman Antix. After enduring the usual amateur lows –including a job as the star of a Sevent-Day Adventist in-house video-he caught his first break at 25, when he was cast in a low-budget film The Crossing. The director, George Oglivie, now remembers he asked Crowe which role he wanted to play. “All of them”, Crowe responded.

Peter Weir, who directed Harrison Ford in Witness and The Mosquito Coast, and Jim Carrey in The Thruman Show, admits to being fascinated and a bit frustrated by his leading man.

“One evening when we’d just had a spectacular week of dailies of Master Commander, I looked over at him and said, ‘How do you do it?’ And he shot back, ‘I don’t know, How do you?’ That’s about as deep as we go in that conversation. I think after we finish the movie I knew Jack Aubrey, the character that he plays, better than I knew the real Russel Crowe. An actor who is it at the top of his game”.