Russell Crowe

Crowe met Australian singer and actor Danielle Spencer while working on The Crossing in 1989. After an intermittent relationship and a later reconciliation, they married in April 2003 and had two sons, Charles and Tennyson. They announced their separation in 2012, amid Crowe's hectic filming schedule, and their divorce was finalized in 2018.

Crowe was also romantically involved with his Proof of Life co-star Meg Ryan in 2000. He has lived for many years in Nana Glen, New South Wales, where he has been active in local community causes, including support for a school swimming pool and fundraising for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service.

Crowe moved with his family from Wellington to Sydney when he was four. His parents catered film and television sets, and he appeared on Australian television as a child, including in Spyforce. The family returned to New Zealand in 1978, after which Crowe continued his education in Auckland before pursuing performing work.

In the early 1980s, he performed under the name Russ Le Roq and recorded songs including “I Just Wanna Be Like Marlon Brando.” He and Billy Dean Cochran formed Roman Antix, which later evolved into the rock band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. Crowe served as the band's lead singer and guitarist, and the group released three full-length albums. He later collaborated with Alan Doyle in the band the Ordinary Fear of God.

Crowe began his professional stage career in musicals, including The Rocky Horror Show, which he performed in New Zealand and Australia from 1986 to 1988. He also appeared in Blood Brothers and Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom before moving into film and television roles.

His first feature films included Blood Oath, The Crossing and Proof. His performance as a brutal neo-Nazi skinhead in Romper Stomper brought him an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actor, following his supporting-actor win for Proof. He later played a gay plumber in The Sum of Us and made his first American film appearance in the western The Quick and the Dead.

Crowe's first major American success came with L.A. Confidential in 1997, in which he played Bud White, a forceful but vulnerable Los Angeles police officer. He followed it with his Oscar-nominated performance as tobacco-industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in Michael Mann's The Insider.

In Gladiator, Crowe played Maximus, a Roman general who is forced into slavery and becomes a gladiator. The Ridley Scott epic made him a worldwide star and earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. His role as mathematician John Nash in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind brought a third consecutive Best Actor Oscar nomination, after The Insider and Gladiator. He also earned acclaim as Captain Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and boxer James J. Braddock in Cinderella Man.

Crowe continued to work in historical dramas, thrillers and westerns during the 2000s. His credits included 3:10 to Yuma, American Gangster, Body of Lies and State of Play. He collaborated repeatedly with director Ridley Scott, including on A Good Year, American Gangster and Robin Hood.

In Robin Hood, Crowe played the legendary outlaw, while in The Next Three Days he portrayed a man trying to free his wife from prison. His later roles included Javert in Les Misérables, Jor-El in Man of Steel and the title character in Noah. He made his feature-directing debut with The Water Diviner in 2014, in which he also played a father searching for his sons after the First World War.

Crowe played an enforcer alongside Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys, Dr. Henry Jekyll in The Mummy, and a father in Boy Erased. He also portrayed Fox News founder Roger Ailes in the miniseries The Loudest Voice, earning the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.

His later film roles included an angry driver in Unhinged, Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder, exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth in The Pope's Exorcist, Nikolai Kravinoff in Kraven the Hunter and Hermann Göring in Nuremberg. Crowe also directed and starred in the crime thriller Poker Face, and previously codirected the documentary Texas about 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.

Crowe has supported the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league club since childhood and became a co-owner in 2006 with businessman Peter Holmes à Court. He used his entertainment connections to promote the club and helped attract players including Sam Burgess and Greg Inglis. The Rabbitohs won the NRL premiership in 2014, their first in 43 years.

His charitable work has included helping a Jewish elementary school repair a library damaged by arson and supporting the construction of a swimming pool at a primary school near his home in rural Australia. In 2023, proceeds from an Indoor Garden Party concert in Bologna were donated to victims of the Emilia-Romagna floods.