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Best Known For
Actor Russell Crowe won an Oscar for his performance in the 2000 blockbuster Gladiator and a nomination for his 2001 role in A Beautiful Mind.
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Russell Crowe - Full Episode (44:58)
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Russell Crowe - Full Episode
By the mid-1990s, Australian actor Russell Crowe had proven himself with a diversity of roles. Crowe vaulted to A-list Hollywood stardom with his charismatic and Oscar-winning performance in Gladiator.
Frank Lucas - American Gangster
After almost falling into obscurity, an article on Frank in New York Magazine prompted Universal Studios to buy the rights to make the film "American gangster."
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Play NowRussell Crowe. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 02:53, May 20, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435.
Russell Crowe. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435 [Accessed 20 May 2013].
"Russell Crowe." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 20 2013, 02:53 http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435.
"Russell Crowe," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435 [accessed May 20, 2013].
"Russell Crowe," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435 (accessed May 20, 2013).
Russell Crowe [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 20] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435.
Russell Crowe, http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435 (last visited May 20, 2013).
Russell Crowe. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/russell-crowe-9262435. Accessed May 20, 2013.
Synopsis
Early Life
Actor. Born April 7, 1964, in Wellington, New Zealand. His family moved to Sydney, Australia, when Crowe was four years old. He spent a good deal of time on the sets of various film and television productions, where his parents worked as caterers; at age six, Crowe was cast as an orphan in the TV series Spyforce, the first of his many small parts as a child actor. His family returned to New Zealand in 1978, and Crowe began performing as a rock singer, billing himself as Rus le Roc and recording the prophetically titled 1980 single “I Want to Be Like Marlon Brando.” During this period, he and a friend formed Roman Antix, which later evolved into 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, a rock band for which Crowe still sings, plays guitar, and writes lyrics.Early Career
He returned to Australia in the early 1980s to pursue his acting career, winning a role in a production of the musical Grease in 1983. From 1986 to 1988, Crowe starred in a touring production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A role in the stage musical Blood Brothers in 1989 led to his first feature film, Blood Oath (1990, released in the U.S. as Prisoners of the Sun). His other early films included The Crossing (1990), which marked his first leading role, and The Efficiency Expert (1991, released in the U.S. as Spotswood), with Anthony Hopkins and Toni Collette. His breakthrough roles showcased two very different sides of Crowe—in 1992’s Proof, he played a gentle, gullible dishwasher, earning an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Supporting Actor; he won the Best Actor statue the next year, for his turn as a brutal Nazi skinhead in the controversial film Romper Stomper. His next and equally iconoclastic role was as a gay plumber living with his widowed father in The Sum of Us (1994).International Fame
In 1995, Crowe made his American film debut, appearing with Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Leonardo DiCaprio in the offbeat Western The Quick and the Dead, which met with a mediocre critical and popular reception. That same year, he played SID 6.7, a virtual reality outlaw created as a composite of more than 150 serial killers (SID stands for Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous) who is hunted by Denzel Washington in the poorly rated sci-fi thriller Virtuosity. He also played the romantic leads in the little-seen films Rough Magic (1995), opposite Bridget Fonda, and Breaking Up (1997), opposite Salma Hayek.
Though many insiders pegged him as “one to watch,” no one in America really paid attention to Crowe until L.A. Confidential, the highly acclaimed 1997 neo-noir film that probed the dark underside of Los Angeles in the 1950s. Crowe played the brutal, forthright cop Bud White, one of a trio of very different policemen—the film also starred Kevin Spacey and fellow Australian Guy Pearce—who stumble upon a twisted and murderous conspiracy.
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