By LOUIS B. HOBSON -- Calgary Sun
Monday, January 5, 1998

Russell Crowe doesn't mind that outside his native Australia he's still Russell WHO?

Crowe has been in show business almost all of his 33 years. His parents were caterers on movie sets in New Zealand and Australia, and his grandfather was a cinematographer.

"I was on movie sets from the time I was four years old. I saw who made the food and who ate it. You go figure why I decided to be an actor," says Crowe.

And an actor he is.

He wowed Australians three years in a row, winning that country's equivalent of the Oscar for best actor. He was the hateful skinhead in Romper Stomper, the dishwasher who befriends a blind man in Proof and the gay plumber in The Sum of Us.

Crowe will arrive in Alberta next week to begin filming an as-yet-untitled Disney movie in and around Canmore. He'll play the sheriff of a small Alaskan town whose pond hockey team gets to challenge the New York Rangers.

He's the star of L.A. Confidential, one of last year's most critically acclaimed films, and on Jan. 23, the Globe Cinema will open Crowe's latest Australian film, Heaven's Burning, in which he plays a man on the run from petty criminals, an irate husband and the police.

His other American films include The Quick and the Dead, Virtuosity and the still-to-be-released Rough Magic with Bridget Fonda and Breaking Up with Salma Hayek.

"I may work increasingly in America, but I'm an Australian through to the bone," says Crowe. "I have no intention of doing the Mel Gibson thing.

"The last thing Hollywood needs is another pseudo-American Aussie action star."

Crowe is the first to admit he owes the Hollywood part of his career to Sharon Stone. The actress saw a video of Romper Stomper and informed Columbia Pictures she wanted the unknown actor to play her love interest in The Quick and the Dead.

It cost Columbia Pictures $1 million to delay Stone's western so Crowe could finish filming The Sum of Us.

"If Sharon hadn't brought me over here, I'd just be another hard-working Aussie actor. Now I have a bit of this thing Americans call celebrity."

Curtis Hanson, who directed Crowe in L.A. Confidential, insists if Stone hadn't discovered Crowe for American audiences, he would have. He too rented Romper Stomper.

"I was blown away. I was convinced Russell was either a real skinhead or one of the finest, most intense actors in the business today.

"I knew he was the only actor who could do justice to (cop) Bud White's duality in L.A. Confidential. Russell is a guy who scares you with his intensity but who has incredible warmth and tenderness.

"He's a hard guy to get to know, but once you do you feel you have a true friend in Russell."

Crowe doesn't dispute his image.

"I'm a loud, obnoxious, up-front kind of guy who loves to act. My intensity is often misinterpreted by many people in the profession. It has earned me a bit of a reputation at home and here.

"Most people who've had reservations about working with me tell me later that once they got to know me I was nothing like my reputation."

When Crowe isn't somewhere in North America or Australia shooting a film, he lives on a working farm seven hours north of Sydney.

"My parents and my (older) brother take care of the place for me when I'm away.

"I'm a bit of a disgrace to my neighbors. I'm a farmer's nightmare. I get too attached to the animals on my farm. Once I've made friends with them, I find it difficult to eat them."

Since he was 14, Crowe has been singing and playing in bands. For the past 13 years, he's been the frontman for the Aussie band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.

Last year, he and his three partners did a 22-city tour of Australia and released a CD.

Don't expect Crowe to start jamming in local bars.

"My music isn't relevant anywhere but in Australia because my songs are about my life in Australia. They're too personal and regional to mean anything over here."

Crowe's girlfriend is also a musician and when he can, he travels with her band.

He recalls that when he told his parents he wanted to be an actor, they suggested he go to college so he'd always have something to fall back on.

"I told them I might fall on my face occasionally, but I'd never fall back. Acting is my life."