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At 39, Crowe is a three-time Academy Award nominee (he won Best Actor for 2000's Gladiator). He is not yet the biggest box-office draw on the planet (that's Tom Cruise), but he has jumped Cruise and Tom Hanks in many directors' casting wish lists. "He gets offered everything--or everything good--first," says an agent. (Crowe turned down the Hugh Grant part in About a Boy, the Laurence Fishburne part in The Matrix and Viggo Mortensen's role in The Lord of the Rings, among others.) But where Hanks and Cruise insinuated their way into moviegoers' hearts by exuding amiability on-and offscreen, Crowe has pulled off a far more unlikely trick: he is one of the world's biggest stars and is frequently perceived as one of the world's biggest jerks.
Much of the negativity stems from an insane gauntlet Crowe ran at the onset of fame, when, in short order, he had to deal with a highly publicized affair with Meg Ryan; rumored (and denied) trysts with Courtney Love, Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman and Sarah Ferguson; countless apparent losses of temper; and a kidnapping threat serious enough that he needed a dozen security escorts with him on the night he won his Oscar. Crowe did not handle any of this particularly well. Instead of expressing amused bewilderment at the peculiarity of fame--a strategy Colin Farrell has perfected--he was defiant, his Maximusian scowl declaring "How dare you be intrigued by me, ungrateful rabbling dogs!" Soon he was being parodied as a great marauding sourpuss on South Park.
Crowe's life is now significantly calmer. In the study of his vast apartment, where we lunch on calamari and ginger beer, there is a picture of Danielle Spencer, the Australian singer and actress he married this past April. Spencer is pregnant with Crowe's first child, a son, due in January. I ask if domesticity has calmed him, and he raises a hand: Eat, then interview. When lunch is over, he says, "I'm sure regardless of my marriage and impending fatherhood, certain things shift just because of age." One of those things is that he no longer goes out to bars simply to prove that he is not too famous to go out to bars. "I am a famous actor," he says with the grim acceptance of a recovering addict.
Crowe has been working as an actor since age 6, when his father, a hotel manager and film-set caterer, got him a job on a TV show. "I didn't work continuously when I was a young fella, just little bits and pieces," he says, "enough to formulate the desire. And I was never a child star, just a child extra, so I was learning and observing without pressure." After school, Crowe wanted to attend college to study history. But his father was out of work, so instead he hit the market and got jobs in repertory productions of Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sang in a moderately successful band, Roman Antix. After enduring the usual amateur lows--including a job as the star of a Seventh-Day Adventist in-house video--he caught his first big break at 25, when he was cast in a low-budget film, The Crossing. The director, George Ogilvie, says he asked Crowe which role he wanted to play. "All of them," Crowe responded.