‘Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson – people like that. We haven’t seen stars like that here for some tim. He’s maybe it.’
– screenwriter David Franzoni
At the 2000 Oscar ceremony Russell received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Gladiator. Wearing his grandfather’s medals, he said, ‘My grandfather’s name was Stan Wemyss. He was a cinematographer in the Second World War. My uncle David, David William Crowe, he died last year at the age of 66. I’d like to thank the Academy for something which is pretty surprising and dedicate it to two men who still continue to inspire me. I’d also like to thank my mum and dad, who I just don’t thank enough I suppose.
‘But really folks, I owe this to one bloke and his name is Ridley Scott. You know, when you grow up in the suburbs of Sydney or Auckland, or Newcastle like Ridley or Jamie Bell… or the suburbs of anywhere, you know a dream like this seems kind of vaguely ludicrous and completely unobtainable. But this moment is directly connected to those childhood imaginings. And for anybody who’s on the downside of advantage and relying purely on courage… it’s possible.’
Talking about his Oscar win, Russell said, ‘To be honest, when you’re younger and cooler, you say those sort of things don’t mean anything, but then on the day when they pat you on the back and they say, “Look, mate, we’re noticing what you’re doing – thanks very much,” you think of the people who spent a life in the cinema and didn’t receive that kind of accolade, and it’s sort of a humbling experience. And it’s very nice and all that. But it doesn’t change the way I do things.’
Everyone who played their part in Russell blossoming into the fierce and passionate actor he had become was delighted with his success. His old musician pal Tom Sharplin can remember phoning the actor to congratulate him, but it was Russell’s mother who answered. She told him, ‘You should have been here, Tom. He’d never have got this far if it wasn’t for you.’
His grandmother Joy said, ‘I’ve never been a believer in ghosts, but when I saw the medal on Russell’s chest I knew Stan was with me here. I felt his presence so strongly in the room with me. Stan would have sat here crying, as I was, with pride. He thought the world of Russell and he was really soft hearted.’
Joy also revealed that she got too scared watching Gladiator. ‘It was a wonderful movie but I couldn’t take it when I thought he was going to be killed. I stood up and shouted, “No, no, leave him alone! Don’t hurt him!” People were laughing and I heard Russell say, “Joy, sit down.”
It’s proof of how enduring the film is that despite Russell’s character dying at the end, there is still talk of a sequel featuring Maximus. In 2006, Scott said, ‘I will probably do a sequel to Gladiator. The only problem is Russell Crowe was such a powerful presence and, of course, Maximus dies at the end. We’ll have to get Russell back somehow.’
Not that Russell and Scott ever regretted killing Maximus off. They knew that was the only way the film could have ended – although it was an outcome that the studio would have preferred to avoid.
‘Although Gladiator is a movie about vengeance, it’s also a movie about death and that’s why Max had to die,’ Russell explained. ‘When we killed him, the studio just about had ten puppies. They couldn’t believe it, and we had to keep that piece of information aside for a while. But when they saw it in place, they realised that in the fullness of what Ridley had created, it was the only fair way to end that film.
‘I mean, if you ended that film and Max jumps up and says, “It’s only a flesh wound! Just give us a couple of aspirins”, then the journey won’t be as fulfilling.’
Russell had made it, but his hunger for the job was even fiercer than when he was starting out and yearning for success. In an interview with Sony Magazine, he said, ‘Once, when I was earning about 26 cents a movie, someone asked, “What would you do if you were earning $10 million a movie?” And I went, “Retire. Go home, pay the bills, look after Mum and Dad and say goodbye to work.”
‘But of course the reality of the thing is that you are not in this business for the bucks anyway. And I know that will come across as being incredibly pretentious and something that people will assassinate me for, but this gig’s a calling, man, especially for people that do it in a public way for more than four or five years.
‘You know, you put up with all the crap that comes with this job and you have to love it at its core. And I dig it, man; I think it’s a privilege making films. It’s the most expensive, creative medium on the planet and it is a privilege for me to do it. I give it my best and I don’t have any problems whatsoever in standing up in front of a group of people and saying, “I take making movies seriously and if you don’t then golly, you obviously won’t like my movies.” That’s about it, really.’
Gladiator thrust Russell into the spotlight. He would find this constant attention on him incredibly intrusive – never more than during filming of his next movie, Proof of Life. He told the Vancouver Sun, ‘I’ve just decided to do a movie with Taylor Hackford… where I play an Australian. It’s taken a long time, but now I get to play a serious, tertiary-educated, sentient character who speaks with my native accent in a big-budget Hollywood film.’
‘It’s a pretty similar situation to the other scripts that I read and end up doing in that there’s something within the stories – new or fresh. There is a lot of information in this story that we haven not seen before.’
Playing an Australian pleased Russell hugely. He had been irked by the press back home suggesting that he had turned his back on his country because of his success in Hollywood and his seeming desire to use American accents.
His ire was further stoked during an award ceremony when Bryan Brown listed the names of ‘Australian actors who have not only contributed to Australian cinema but also to the Australian identity’ and pointedly left out Nicole Kidman – who was present at the ceremony – and his Blood Oath co-star.
When Russell presented an award soon after the perceived slight, he said, ‘Bryan, on behalf of Nicole Kidman and myself, we forgive you. You’re ignoring the fact that, based on hard work, sweat and commitment, there is a bridge that exists between the Australian and the film industry.’
Proof of Life, which was based on the Vanity Fair article Adventures in the Ransom Trade, tells the story of hostage negotiator Terry Thorne in his quest to rescue an American engineer. Complications arise when he begins to develop an attraction to the hostage’s wife Alice.
Talking about the differences between his character Terry Thorne and that of Maximus in Gladiator, he said, ‘Just the physicality of Terry Thorne in Proof of Life, for example. It’s much more contemporary than the body of Maximus. He’s gone to a gym. He’s worked on farms and he’s big and round and everything. Terry’s got this striation because he works out at the gym and he’s got X amount of time in the day to do that kind of physical work. The more you inform yourself and fuel the internal engine that drives the character, then you get to the point where you can be standing on a hillside, saying no dialogue, but completely communicating to every person that’s watching that film all of those peaks of desperation, joy, sadness and acceptance without saying a single word.’
Talking about Terry, Russell told the Vancouver Sun, ‘He’s got a very good bedside manner. He’s very calm and reassuring to the client, but there is a distance. He has his business sincerity level but at the same time what happens in our story cuts through his ordinarily objective persona where he is affected more emotionally by the people involved.’
Explaining why he cast Russell in the film, Hackford said, ‘Russell had done L.A. Confidential, which I was impressed with. However, I’d heard that Russell had two films in the can, The Insider and Gladiator that no one had seen.
‘I called both directors, who are my colleagues, and asked them a major favour: to go into their editing rooms and see Russell’s unreleased work. I first saw Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. I fully expected Ridley to paint a huge canvas, but I was particularly impressed by how Russell Crowe dominated that canvas. His physicality was palpable, but there was also a real intelligence shining through all that physicality.
‘Then I went across town into Michael Mann’s editing room and saw an actor who’d gained 45lb playing an entirely non-physical, intellectual character involved in a crisis of conscience. I thought, “This guy is an incredible actor and he’s definitely going to be a star!”’
It would be a gruelling shoot – with Hackford desperate to have as many location-based shots as possible. They would film parts of the movie in Poland (‘It’s cold enough to freeze the nuts off a brown dog on a rusty chain at 50 yards before he had time to eat his tucker,’ said Russell) and Ecuador.
‘When Russell Crowe crawls through a dense cloud forest, there’s rain and mud all over him. This is real. It’s not called a rain forest for nothing,’ Hackford said.
The cast and crew would have to put up with arduous conditions, altitude sickness, fear of landslides and low visibility. ‘Eventually, all of us started to feel like hostages’ – and Russell and Hackford would regularly clash on set.
As William Prochnau would write in Proof of Life: A Writer’s Notebook: ‘Of all the super-egos who careened testily and creatively off each other on the set of Proof of Life, none were more complex than the director, Taylor Hackford. No one could rise so suddenly to brutalising verbal assaults or retreat so abruptly to emotional, almost self-flagellating but genuine apologies.
‘Some who work for him tell you freely that they hate him and just as certainly that they will return to his side for his next movie.’
The pair’s relationship would wobble ‘between raw-edged and comical’, with Russell forced to wait in a trailer for half a day as Hackford ran over the shooting schedule that day on a minor scene with an extra.
Russell would re-pay him by turning up late for filming on a handful of occasions. One instance saw him arrive late on a Sunday morning after a heavy night’s partying, saying, ‘Sorry mate, sermon ran long.’
The love scenes were cut. ‘Hackford admits he filmed a more explicit love scene but that it has been exorcised from the final print’, Russell explained.
‘This was completely my decision,’ the director said. ‘There was no pressure from Meg, or Russell for that matter – and certainly not from the studio. I screened the film with and without the love scene and had to go with the version that worked best for audiences… Too much romance detracts from the action-adventure.
‘If I wanted to be sensational I could have inserted the scene, but it would have detracted greatly. I wanted the relationship between the characters to be tenuous and ambiguous.’
As ever, Russell would do as many stunts as possible, telling US chat-show host Jay Leno, ‘Yeah, well if I can give the director as many 100 per cent shots as I can, then the audience stays right within the story. They don’t say, “Oh, hold on a second, that body shape is a little bit different,” or “His nose is bigger” or whatever. So I think it just adds to the excitement of the movie.’
Russell received training for his part from former SAS members, and claimed to camp out in the Ecuadorian rainforests rather than stay in a plush hotel. ‘I made a barbecue out of an oil can and stole food off the caterer. I’d wave as everybody drove off in the evening and wave as they drove back in the morning and people were like, “Are you crazy? There’s wild cats in the jungle.” Quite frankly I will take the wild cats over the Ecuadorian drivers any day.’
It’s probably safe to assume that his bodyguard (former SAS man Adam Hamon) was with him at the time.
The SAS consultant was Thell Reed – the same man who had taught Russell how to quick-draw and shoot for The Quick and the Dead. Because Russell had had little to no experience with firearms before that Western, Reed reasoned, ‘No bad habits to unlearn. Now he shoots better than most SAS men.’
As proof of that, Russell was adamant about carrying a firearm in certain parts of Ecuador. ‘The Ecuadorian paratrooper colonel assigned to the movie tried to talk him out of it. No need. Dangerous. Crowe would have none of that – he, Reed and Crowe’s bodyguard wanted gun permits. The colonel warned him that they had to pass a rigid test at the firing range. The top score was five. The colonel got a four. The three outsiders got fives,’ said Prochnau.
Russell’s insistence on doing his own stunts came back to haunt him in one scene.
Said Prochnau, ‘Crowe was decked out each day in jungle khakis, his face painted in green-and-black camouflage streaks. He did his own stunts, which meant a lot of sloshing in the mud and combat rolls down hillsides with an M-4 rifle.
‘In one, he did a 30ft roll, coming up weapon ready at the hut in which David Morse was being held captive. In his first practice, the roll went perfectly, then ended behind the hut in a terrible clatter and a roar of “Mutha-fucka!” that echoed through the jungle hills. Crowe had rolled over three unseen logs. Everyone rushed toward him. Was he hurt? An old injury, he said, shaking it off. But it wasn’t that old – a shoulder injured making Gladiator and, unknown to anyone, the same injury that later would require surgery and force him out of his next movie. He went back and did the same scene six more times.’
Tragedy struck the set early on in the shooting. Morse’s stand-in Will Gaffney – a 29-year-old teacher who had been on holiday – and five extras were filming a ‘minor’ scene when their truck careened off the road and down a 350ft ravine. While the extras survived, Gaffney sadly died. Hackford would later say, ‘I don’t think any film is worth losing your life for. It’s something I’ll always carry with me.’ As perfectly fine as it is, the hostage drama would just be a signpost in Russell’s career – overshadowed by two events in Russell’s life.
The first, bizarrely, involved a real-life hostage situation that was far more exciting than the film. Because of Gladiator’s success and the subsequent Oscar win, Russell became something of an American hero, which was why he became a target for extremists.
‘That was the first conversation in my life that I’d ever heard the phrase Al Qaeda,’ Russell said. ‘It was something to do with some recording picked up by a French policewoman, I think, in either Libya or Algiers. I don’t think I was the only person. But it was about – and here’s another little touch of irony – taking iconographic Americans out of the picture as a sort of cultural-destabilization plan.
‘[The FBI] picked up on something they thought was really important, and they were following it through. They were fucking serious, mate. What are you supposed to do? You get this late-night call from the FBI when you arrive in Los Angeles, and they’re like absolutely full-on. “We’ve got to talk to you now, before you do anything. We have to have a discussion with you, Mr Crowe.”
‘We just arrived in Los Angeles, and we got contacted by the FBI, and they arrived at the hotel we were staying at. They went through this big elaborate speech, telling us that for the whole time we were going to be in America, they were going to be around and part of life.
‘You know – oh, I shouldn’t say things like this – I do wonder if it was some kind of PR thing to attract sympathy toward me, because it seemed very odd. Suddenly, it looks like I think I’m fucking Elvis Presley, because everywhere I go there are all these FBI guys around.’
Despite his genuine fears, he can laugh about it now. ‘Oh yeah, there was a point where they said they thought the threat had probably or possibly been overstated, and then they started to question their sources, and blah, blah, blah. But I don’t know how it was resolved, you know? But they were serious about it. And what can you say? I mean, gee, there were a lot of man-hours spent doing that gig, so the least I can say is, “Thank you very much.”
‘I think it was a bit odd. But I also thought, “Mate, if you want to kidnap me, you’d better bring a mouth gag. I’ll be talking you out of the essential philosophies you believe in the first 24 hours, son. I might chew through the first one, too, so be prepared.”’
The second thing that would overshadow the movie was his real-life romance with Meg Ryan, who had played the hostage’s wife. The actress’s marriage to Dennis Quaid was seen as one of the most solid in Hollywood, so news of the Crowe and Ryan romance sent shockwaves around showbiz circles.
Quaid filed for divorce soon after pictures surfaced of Russell and Ryan showing obvious affection – stroking each other’s hair and hands – at a David Bowie concert.
Ryan’s mother, Susan Jordan, said, ‘Everyone else was so surprised when Meg’s affair became public, but I suppose I wasn’t. It was clear her marriage was going nowhere.
‘She’s running all over London with Russell and she’s having a picture taken with him and David Bowie. To me this is not a woman who is ashamed of what she is doing.
‘Meg always liked macho men. I think Russell is exciting and giving her something that was clearly lacking in her marriage.’
It would later transpire that the marriage had not been as solid as it looked. But the damage had already been done – with Russell painted as a home-wrecker.
The public vitriol towards Ryan came as something of a surprise for someone who, at that time, was very much an American sweetheart. Talking about the backlash, she said, ‘It’s a very big surprise in life when you learn that not everyone is rooting for you. It’s a very scary thing when you figure that out. I never imagined that worrying about what other people think of me would be a big part of my day. But, when you get that much negativity thrown at you, you go, “Whew, I’ve got to cope with that.” Nothing I heard in the press resembled the truth. What an insight for me.’
Russell added in 2002, ‘The situation with Meg was simpler and at the same time more complicated. But all the accusations that were levelled towards her and this residual reputation that I now have, all of that was undeserving. It was a much more simple and human situation, and sooner or later people won’t need to talk about it any more.’
Their split – Ryan ending the relationship over a phone call – came at a time when there was fevered speculation over whether theirs would be one of the biggest showbiz weddings of the year. Reports had arisen because the huge bash planned for Russell’s farm – an event that had many revellers, marquee tents and caterers lined up for the excitement. What was overlooked was that the bash was an annual Christmas event held by Russell for his family and friends. It seems the press were hoping that if they wished for an A-list wedding hard enough, one would come.
Russell was badly shaken by the parting. A friend told the media, ‘He virtually didn’t leave his room for two days. His mother was really worried, but by the time his friends started arriving for the party he had composed himself. He joined in the drinking, swimming and barbecues, but Meg’s name was never mentioned.’
The split was in part attributed to him refusing to spend less time in Australia. He said afterwards, ‘I owe her an apology for not being as flexible as I might have been. I don’t think that I’ll ever make that mistake again.’
In another interview he added, ‘The bottom line is, I have a big life here. I’ve got to be here. When I’m off the hook with the schedules, I have to come home. Meg has the same needs. We both have huge schedules. She is a searcher. She’s got an incredibly inquisitive mind, so it was very easy for us to be in the same room together for hours and hours, just talking. That was very special.’
The home-wrecker tag attributed to Russell hit him hard, and it was only six years later, when Ryan talked to Oprah Winfrey, that she admitted he didn’t deserve that. ‘It was a very unhealthy marriage and it was pretty much not a happening marriage for a very long time. I probably should have left much earlier.
‘I’m very sad that it all had to come apart in the way that it seemed to have. It was never about another man, it was only about what my and Dennis’s relationship just couldn’t sustain. He [Crowe] wasn’t a home-wrecker and he took a lot of heat for that and he had a lot of grace, frankly, about not talking about things that he knew were going on in my marriage and I’ll be very grateful for him for a long time for that.
‘Divorce is an impossibly hard transition in your life and he was there for a few months.’
Russell, however, wishes she had said that earlier. ‘It would have been nice to hear [her] say that a few years earlier. A lot of the bad-boy thing and attendant pressures came from that time. Everything seeps out from that, and a mould grows over you, because of the implications. [However] it’s really brave that she finally got around to talking about it in public … the horse has bolted and life has moved on.’
Dennis Quaid said in 2004, ‘I think Russell did Meg and I a big favour. He forced us to face up to something, because we were clinging on to a dead relationship.
‘I felt hurt and humiliated, of course, but we hadn’t been getting on for quite some time. We were bored with each other.’
Despite not regretting their relationship, the accusation that Russell’s relationship with Ryan was the cause for the underperforming box office still rankles.
Hackford told journalists, ‘My biggest fear is that there’s been so much exposure, people will think they’ve already seen this movie. And they haven’t.’
His comments came after a reported early screening saw the crowd laugh during a kissing scene between the pair.
Russell felt compelled to reply to the insinuations about poor box-office returns. ‘Just for clarity,’ he said later, ‘apart from a few kind of strange situations – mainly because of the conditions we were working in, 14,000ft up in the Andes where the weather patterns change every quarter of an hour – every day on that film was about the intensity of work, and Taylor didn’t know I was in a relationship with Meg. It was only through people informing him during the course of interviews that he found out about it. Our personal relationship was separate to our working relationship. We went to work, we did the best job we possibly could for the director.’
Talking about the media’s sudden fascination with him, he said to Tiscali, ‘I have to try and keep a sense of humour about it all. Some of the things you read you get an immediate reaction to, so I’ve stopped reading things now. I do worry about my family though. Some people do try some nasty things to get at them and try to get a reaction from them. The important thing to me is that I’m not driven by people’s praise and I’m not slowed down by people’s criticism. I’m just trying to work at the highest level I can.’