Russell Ira Crowe (born 7 April 1964) is an actor and film director. His work on screen has earned him various accolades, including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award.Crowe was born in New Zealand, spending ten years of his childhood in Australia and residing there permanently by the age of 21.He began acting in Australia and had his break-out role in Romper Stomper (1992). He gained international recognition in the late 1990s for his starring roles in L.A. Confidential (1997) and The Insider (1999). Crowe gained wider stardom for playing the title role of Gladiator (2000), which earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Further acclaim came for portraying real-life mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. in A Beautiful Mind (2001). Crowe then starred in a number of films in the 2000s, including Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Cinderella Man(2005), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), American Gangster (2007), Body of Lies (2008), and Robin Hood (2010).Crowe has since appeared in the films Les Misérables (2012), Man of Steel (2013), Noah (2014), The Nice Guys (2016), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). In 2014, he made his directorial debut with the drama The Water Diviner, in which he also starred. Aside from acting, Crowe has been the co-owner of the National Rugby League (NRL) team South Sydney Rabbitohs since 2006.

EARLY LIFE

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, 11th Lord Lovat, 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.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. 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.

MUSIC

In the 1980s, Crowe, under the name of “Russ le Roq”, recorded a song titled “I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando”.In the 1980s, Crowe and friend Billy Dean Cochran formed a band, Roman Antix, which later evolved into the Australian rock band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts (abbreviated to TOFOG). Crowe performed lead vocals and guitar for the band, which formed in 1992. The band released The Photograph Kills EP in 1995, as well as three full-length records, Gaslight(1998), Bastard Life or Clarity (2001) and Other Ways of Speaking(2003). In 2000, TOFOG performed shows in London, Los Angeles and in Austin, Texas. In 2001, the band toured in the U.S. with dates in Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Hollywood, Philadelphia, New York City and the last show at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey.In early 2005, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts as a group had “dissolved/evolved” with Crowe feeling his future music would take a new direction. He began a collaboration with Alan Doyle of the Canadian band Great Big Sea, and with it a new band emerged, the Ordinary Fear of God, which also involved some members of the previous TOFOG line-up. A new single, “Raewyn”, was released in April 2005 and an album entitled My Hand, My Heart was released. The album includes a tribute song to actor Richard Harris, who became Crowe’s friend during the making of Gladiator.Crowe and his new band the Ordinary Fear of God (keeping the TOFOG acronym) toured Australia in 2005, and then the U.S. In 2006 they returned to the US to promote their new release My Hand, My Heart. In March 2010, the group’s version of the John Williamson song “Winter Green” was included on a new compilation album The Absolute Best of John Williamson: 40 Years True Blue, commemorating the singer-songwriter’s milestone of 40 years in the Australian music industry.On 2 August 2011, the third collaboration between Crowe and Doyle was released on iTunes as The Crowe/Doyle Songbook Vol III, featuring nine original songs followed by their acoustic demo counterparts (for a total of 18 tracks). Danielle Spencer does guest vocals on most tracks. The release coincided with a pair of live performances at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.The digital album was released as download versions only on Amazon.com, iTunes, Spotify. The album has since charted at No. 72 on the Canadian Albums Chart.On 26 September 2011, Crowe appeared onstage at Rogers Arena in Vancouver in the middle of Keith Urban’s concert. He sang a cover of “Folsom Prison Blues”, before joining the rest of the band in a rendition of “The Joker“. On 18 August 2012, Crowe appeared along with Doyle at the Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavík, Iceland as part of the city’s Menningarnótt program.In 2017, Crowe and Doyle had created a new act with Samantha Barks, Scott Grimes and Carl Falk) called Indoor Garden Party who appeared on The One Show to promote their album called The Musical.On 27 June 2023, Crowe sang in concert with his band Indoor Garden Party in Bologna at the Teatro Comunale Nouveau. The concert was very successful, completely sold out. The total proceeds from the concert were entirely donated to the flood victims of Emilia-Romagna.

FILMOGRAPHY AND AWARDS

Crowe’s most acclaimed and highest-grossing films, according to the online portal Box Office Mojo and the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, include L.A. Confidential (1997), The Insider (1999), Gladiator (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), State of Play (2009), Robin Hood (2010), Les Misérables (2012), Man of Steel (2013), Noah (2014), The Nice Guys(2016), The Mummy (2017), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), Land of Bad (2024).Crowe won an Academy Award in the Best Actor category for his performance in Gladiator, and has been nominated two more times for Best Actor for The Insider and A Beautiful Mind, making him the ninth actor to have received three consecutive Academy Award nominations. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for A Beautiful Mind and Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film for The Loudest Voice(2019); He has been nominated four more times: Best Actor in a Drama for The Insider, Gladiator, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Cinderella Man.