Russell Crowe: The Maximun Hero

Image via Wikipedia

Temperamental, hot blood, but in the eyes of Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe “is the sexiest guy working in movies today.”  That was said in the issue of Virginian Pilot  13 years ago when the controversial American actress, with no underwear in Basic Instinct, noticed Crowe’s physical charm and extreme acting ability and invited him to co-star with her in the film Quick and the Dead, which unfortunately did not make it at the box office.  It was a blessing in disguise because after that, though not immediately, he soon found himself gaining stardom in American films, a status he never reached while being an ordinary actor in Australia, the country where he grew up—he was born in New Zealand but the family moved to Australia when he was 4 years old and he was back again at 14 in New Zealand only to finish high school, after which he did some odd jobs, at the same time pursuing his acting  talent at every opportunity (see the dogged persistence!), hoping for the big break.            

The big break he finally had in  Gladiator, the movie that won him the prestigious Academy Award for Best Actor in 2000.   I saw the film myself, which also won Best Picture.  He is awesome, playing the role of the Roman general Maximus in a natural manner, almost without any effort, and I totally agree (up to now) with Sharon Stone about his being the sexiest.  The ineffable charm I noticed in him springs from his impeccable portrayal of a calm, silent but strong hero.            

The same traits I saw in A Beautiful Mind, in which he played John Nash, the troubled, true to life, Nobel Prize-winning, mathematical genius.  Ah, there’s no diminishing a bit of his macho but gentle image.  For that leading role, he was named Best Actor at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 2001.  What is more, he was a three-time Oscar nominee—be patient, please, maybe not yet for him to win an Oscar.            

Gentle as he is on the movie screen, Crowe is, in real life, the western counterpart of our bad boy actor Robin Padilla.  He has earned the reputation of having a hot temper because of incidents like shoving the television  producer Malcolm Gerrie against a wall, peppering him with expletives, for cutting a poem in his acceptance speech at the BAFTA awards, or  throwing a telephone at a hotel employee for not attending to a system malfunction in his room.  All these only add up to his celebrity status as one of the biggest, if not the sexiest, male stars in the world.