Word: masterful
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GRUFF SAILING Master and Commander's audience-wowing, photographer-cursing Russell Crowe is one of our finest actors--and our most reluctant movie star...
...what Russell Crowe's friends call Crowe's "intensity" was on the green waves of Sydney Harbor. In advance of our meeting, Crowe's publicist announced that her client had a surprise for me: he had rented a tall ship--like the one he captains in his new movie, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World--for the sake of a photo shoot and our introductory chat. It seemed a bit obvious--ship movie, ship interview--and I wondered if it wasn't a clumsy gesture designed to focus the conversation on knots and fathoms rather than more...
This, in microcosm, is what Crowe has been doing to moviegoers since his breakout performance in 1997's L.A. Confidential. He jerks them around with surliness, then seduces them with immense talent and charm. "Russell is very unpredictable," says Master director Peter Weir. "In life and on the screen you're never quite sure what he's going to do in any situation. It keeps you watching." Says Ron Howard, Crowe's friend and the director of 2001's A Beautiful Mind: "He's a pretty intense guy. And he is definitely, uh, well, the mood can shift...
Acting for Crowe is the synthesis of two passions: he loves performing, and he also approaches each role as a chance to design his own curriculum and make up for his lost higher education. To play Master and Commander's Jack Aubrey, he spent months learning the violin and studying the linguistic origins of his character's accent. "But the vast majority of it is reading," he says, guiding me to a sagging bookcase. "You've got Sailing for Dummies ..." He laughs, but there it is, next to several dozen more sophisticated volumes on naval history, one of which--Nelson...
Crowe is not a Method actor ("I work between 'Action!' and 'Cut!'"), but he does take his preparatory obsessiveness to the set. On the first day of Master and Commander, he handed out three shirts to each cast member and ordered them to return in 24 hours with name tags sewn on them as a way of getting them used to taking orders from him. "It was kind of done with a wink," says co-star Billy Boyd, who plays a coxswain. "Kind of not, too." Crowe says he does this kind of thing a lot and that...