Crowe's at home with his range

Russell Crowe wore a crocodile tooth on a cord around his neck.

In town the other day to promote "The Insider," Michael Mann's new movie about tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, the 35-year-old New Zealand-born actor interrupted an interview at the Argyle Hotel to shout epithets at a televised rugby match. He took a reporter to task for describing him as proud. And at times he was so blunt in his assessment of Hollywood that when he revealed that he had wrestled a tiger on the set of the upcoming Roman epic "The Gladiator," it was easy to picture the cat in a headlock.

In other words Crowe - whose pent-up portrayal of a brutal cop with a vulnerable heart in the 1997 noir hit "L.A. Confidential" let American audiences in on something Australians have known for years - appears in person to be exactly the tough guy you might expect.

AP PHOTO New Zealand-born Russell Crowe is quickly gaining popularity with American audiences.

"People accuse me of being arrogant all the time. I'm not arrogant, I'm focused," Crowe growled at one point, responding to reports that his strong opinions about acting can make him a challenge on a movie set. "I don't make demands. I don't tell you how it should be. I'll give you (expletive) options, and it's up to you to select or throw 'em away. That should be the headline: If you're insecure, don't (expletive) call."

But if that's the headline, here's the surprising story that goes with it: This man's man, who recently rode 4,000 miles around his adopted Australia on a motorcycle, also has a sweet streak a kilometer wide. He is a collaborative - and unusually generous - performer who has fought to cut his own screen time to protect others' roles. He's a softy for animals - he can't bring himself to slaughter any of the cattle he keeps on his 600-acre farm seven hours northwest of Sydney, so the cows (some of whom have names) have become his "mates."

There's absolutely nothing safe about Crowe on screen. He brought a neo-Nazi skinhead to scary life in Geoffrey Wright's 1992 "Romper Stomper" and played a computer-generated killer opposite Denzel Washington in Brett Leonard's 1995 "Virtuosity." And when not inspiring fear, he's often taking roles that some might see as risky: Playing a gay plumber in the Australian film "The Sum of Us" or a sarcastic gunslinger in the spoof "The Quick and the Dead."

But it is Crowe's leading role in Disney's "The Insider" that has everybody talking these days. He plays the tightly wound Wigand, whose decision to reveal a tobacco company's secrets to CBS' "60 Minutes" made him and his family the targets of a smear campaign.

Crowe is 17 years younger than the 52-year-old Wigand (he gained 35 pounds for the part and wears a gray wig), but his physical transformation is not what you'll notice first. Instead, what's most striking is Crowe's restrained fury. From his carefully knotted necktie to his practiced golf swing, Crowe's Wigand is a painstaking and deliberate man, and one you don't want to cross.

"What Russell is doing, which is so difficult, is he's conveying the anomalies of the man, not what's symmetrical and easily observable," said Mann, who believes Crowe and his co-star, Al Pacino, who plays "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman, "have one thing in common as actors: courage. They have no fear of embarrassment. (The trick is) nailing awkwardness. Not nailing grace. Nailing grace is a lot easier."

Mann laughed at the memory of Crowe's discovery that the real Wigand wasn't as good a golfer as the one the director planned to portray in the film. Crowe saw Wigand's sorry golf game as a key detail that helped explain why Wigand ultimately failed to fit into corporate culture. Conversely, Mann wanted to use a few scenes of a more proficient Wigand hitting balls at a driving range to highlight the man's self-discipline and loneliness. The director was willing to fudge the truth a little to make his point. But for Crowe, it didn't fit and he said so. Repeatedly.

"He's totally an actor. Totally. I don't know what goes on between roles," said Mann, his voice deeply respectful even as he remembers the golf debate. Crowe, he said, resembles a young Marlon Brando. "Look at 'On the Waterfront,' at 'Streetcar' or even 'The Young Lions,' and you see this raw, powerful talent that's dead serious and accomplished. That's Russell to me. I'm dying to work with him again."

Crowe values straight talk, and he rarely stifles himself. For example, on the set of "The Gladiator," in which he plays a Roman general who is unlawfully imprisoned and condemned to participate in the blood sport of the day, he spoke up about the accent, which he thought was all wrong.

"My character was Spanish, and I wanted to do Antonio Banderas with better elocution. But they wouldn't let me," said Crowe - a proven vocal chameleon who believes a proper accent is essential to a fully realized character. "They didn't want people to be distracted by it. But I felt when you say you're Spanish 50 times in the course of the movie, I should be doing the accent. Instead, basically everybody in the movie does, you know, Royal Shakespeare Company two pints after lunch."

Nevertheless, he loved working on the film, due out next year from DreamWorks, partly because it is so rare as an actor to get the chance to do an epic and partly because director Ridley Scott, he says, "is Picasso."

Crowe has been acting since he was 6 years old, when he got his first speaking part on a TV show. Show business was in his blood - his parents were location caterers, and his grandfather was a cinematographer. Crowe jokes that he was the only one in the family stupid enough to work on the other side of the camera.

Crowe also has genuine admiration for other actors. He's such a fan of Jodie Foster (whom he's never met) that when she had her baby last year, he sent her a couple of tiny rugby jumpers. And when his movies wrap, he always tries to trade the canvas director's chair with his name printed on it for the chair of one of his co-stars. ("I've got Kim Basinger," he says happily. "Now that's (expletive) cool, isn't it?")

"I think you've got to be a fan first to be able to be a performer," Crowe said. "Acting has a lot to do with living in the real world."

11-11-99