By: Ruth Hessey

Names like Russell Crowe, Noah Taylor and Aden Young are being whispered from Cannes to Los Angeles. The one thing they all have in common is a very Australian reluctance to smarm around like publicity-hungry stars on the rise. That sort of stuff doesn't scare me," smiles Crowe, fresh from a photographic session which he slid through with King-of-the-jungle calm."I have a very mercenary attitude to publicity. If it sells the gig, that means I can do another one next week."

At 27, Russell Crowe behaves like a veteran, almost an ANZAC of the industry. His sly smile sidles up to you, a watchful mixture of arrogance and charm. With the tremendous success of Proof (the Australian feature which was a huge hit at Cannes and gave Russell Crowe his first AFI award for Best Supporting Actor), his profile has pounced out from the shadowland of bit parts.

His boyish features, first brought to our attention in George Ogilvie's The Crossing, could never be called pretty. Cut from the same rough cloth as your basic antipodean larrikin, the Crowe charisma is getting more craggy and interesting, rather than movie-star smooth.

He has a reputation as something of a wild boy in the genteel circles of acting, but this is an image he plays up for fun. Crowe is one of the hardest working actors around and you won't see him do the same thing twice.

Since The Crossing, he has carved extraordinary chunks from the film roles available, metamorphosing from skinhead thug(in the recently completed Romper Stomper to understanding friend Proof to despicable go-getter (in Spotswood with Anthony Hopkins). He is, says director George Ogilvie,"a man who can play almost anything."

But I wasn't immediately taken with him" Ogilvie recalls of their first meeting, a casting session for The Crossing"He had a very ' I'm Russell Crowe, who are you? attitude. He was very polite, very gracious, but he made no effort to please me at all."

Like Taylor and Young, Crowe is not the product of an establishment star factory like NIDA."I have a bit of an advantage," he admits,"when I was playing in bands in New Zealand, I used to get reviewed all the time and slagged off. I remember those four hours on stage in a hotel having cans thrown at me. But I lived. They didn't hit me. These things teach you."

Far from the reverent atmosphere of th e theatre, Crowe learnt to land on his feet."One review said that my music was so pathetically obvious that it could become perverse." He smiles again."It never did though, just went straight to the bottom of the charts."

Crowe's rock 'n' roll days may not have made him an international recording artist, but they explain the faint rock star swagger.

"If I hadn't had that rock 'n' roll background I wouldn't be doing this. I wouldn't be getting the roles" he says.

"It is a great way to learn how to manoeuv re an audience. You get out in the country somewhere, and there hasn't been a band there for about a month. There's four hundred expectant faces. At the beginning of the night they're all looking at you sideways from the back of the room, then they come down closer to the stage. I used to get really silly and walk on the stage and put a dramatic light up and say 'come to me children'. He chuckles."And they would, ha ha ha."

Making the break from New Zealand pubs to Sydney cinemas was no piece of cake, but Crowe never felt intimidated. His parents were film caterers and he's been involved in show business since he was six."I never had any doubt about being able to do this."

That is obvious from the storie he tells about those Sydney days"I met the director of The Delinquents about a fortnight before I met George Ogilvie and he was so arrogant. I had no film credits and he was going through my CV, saying, 'Have you done any Big Jobs?' and I was thinking 'That's twenty years of my life on that page, you son of a bitch.'

"Then I saw the film he made. . . and I met someone like George Ogilvie, and he goes through the same list of credits and I got the gig with The Crossing. Whatever you want to say about it, it's a feature film, and deserves its place in the cinema. The Delinquents is another thing altogether. Kylie(Minogue) was watchable, Charlie (Schlatter) was a wet fish. That kind of opportunistic casting is what killed the biz here in the first place."

Certainly Crowe and his comrades represent the post-10BA generation. They have thrived on low-budget pictures, not aiming for an overseas market or relying on the names of overseas stars. In this exciting vibrant atmosphere they have become the stars.

Crowe says the Geoffrey Wright, who directed Romper StomperÊ is the most stylistical ly versatile director I've worked with. A lot of stuff we did was just improvising on the day. He didn't have the budget or the schedule to be finicky, so he just threw the scene into the room and let it go."

A similar amount of latitudinal behaviour characterised the set of David Elphick's Love in Limbo, Where Crowe (playing an anally retentive, Welsh, Baptist virgin) and Aden Young first met."Something extraordinary happened when you put them in a scene together" recalls director David Elphick"Russell and Ad en both have a dangerous screen quality, a magnetism. It was an exhausting challenge harnessing that talent to the screenplay, but they were great fun to make a movie with."

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