By LOUIS B. HOBSON -- Calgary Sun

CANMORE -- It will be a long while before Russell Crowe forgets his first impressions of Calgary.

Crowe -- the star of The Quick and the Dead, Virtuosity and the Oscar-nominated L.A. Confidential -- is in Canmore filming the Disney hockey movie Mystery Alaska.

He plays John Biebe, the sheriff of Mystery and one of the star players on the town's legendary pond hockey team.

The movie also stars Burt Reynolds, Colm Meaney, Hank Azaria, Ron Eldard, Lolita Davidovich, Judith Ivy and Mary McCormack.

Crowe was the first of the film's international stars to arrive because he wanted to get maximum skating practice in before filming began.

Crowe flew directly from Australia to Calgary.

"It was 35 C when I left Sydney and it was -26 C and a snowstorm when I arrived in Calgary. It was quite literally a slap in the face," recalls Crowe.

"I honestly wondered why people would ever choose to live here."

Fortunately, there was a chinook waiting in the wings.

No sooner had Crowe arrived in the first week of January, but he set about finding a temporary residence in Canmore. His one stipulation was it had to be near a pond, so he could get out on the ice as much as possible.

Back in Australia when he was growing up, Crowe played his share of sports and studied martial arts, but this is his first encounter with skating and hockey.

To build his stamina and learn to skate, he worked out three hours each day on weights and spent three hours with skating instructors and hockey trainers.

"I'm really getting addicted to hockey. I can understand why it is so popular.

"We have quite a few ex-patriate Canadians in Australia so we have hockey leagues now, too."

Crowe is turning into a regular Canuck. He has perfected a Canadian accent because he feels "Alaska is so close to Canada that it would only be natural that some of the inhabitants of the town are Canadian and John Biebe is one of them."

After he had finished filming L.A. Confidential a year ago, Crowe was inundated with scripts.

He says he settled on Mystery, Alaska because "there was no serial killer in it and it seemed so lively and so real. I particularly like the fact John Biebe is a hands-on kind of sheriff. He doesn't carry a pistol. He's more of a friend to the townspeople than he is a policeman."

This is quite a departure from Bud White, the detective he played in L.A. Confidential, who was an emotionally-scared bully.

Crowe is famous for his intense chameleon performances, particularly in Australia where he has won three Australian Oscars.

In Romper Stomper, he played a hateful white supremacist, only to turn around a few years later to create the shy, gay rugby player in The Sum of Us.

Curtis Hanson, who directed Crowe in L.A. Confidential, says the 33-year-old Aussie is "one of the most dedicated actors I've ever met. When he's in front of the camera, he can scare you with his intensity but, as a person, he has incredible warmth and tenderness."

Mystery Alaska marks Crowe's 19th feature film.

He has already signed for his 20th

Two weeks after he finishes filming Mystery Alaska, Crowe will join Al Pacino and director Michael Mann in Los Angeles for the drama Man of the People, about the court cases facing the tobacco industry.

"Michael has promised me that I can spend one week somewhere on a sunny beach. That was the only condition to my accepting Man of the People."