With Nuremberg out in Australian cinemas, we cast an eye over Rusty’s eclectic, varied and downright impressive oeuvre. Are you not entertained?
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ussell Crowe’s hair-raising performance as Hermann Göring in Nuremberg is the latest example of the veteran actor’s high-risk, high-reward approach. He has a knack for taking on difficult, baggage-laden roles that could have gone spectacularly badly – only to deliver the goods and make you want to stand up and yell “bravo!” You’ll struggle to find many other actors working today with an oeuvre as eclectic, varied and downright impressive as the Wellington-born star’s. Here are his 20 greatest performances.
Ron Howard’s film about real-life boxer James J Braddock, aka Cinderella Man, is overlong and middle-of-the-road but Crowe’s in fine form as the down-on-his-luck athlete who has a bung hand but maybe, just maybe, can mount a comeback. Sporting a convincingly rough-edged, working-class New Jersey accent, he softens the traditional bruiser archetype and makes potentially mawkish lines (“I can’t be a boxer no more!”) land with disarming sincerity.
Derrick Borte’s road-rage thriller is a bit of a B-movie: loud, implausible and indeed unhinged. But Crowe is scarily good as a full-blown psycho. When his character Tom Cooper pulls up beside the protagonist (Caren Pistorius) and asks her to apologise for beeping at him, you know you’re in for a hell of a ride, barely repressed rage oozing from his pores.
