Articles/Interviews

Mark Coleman In New York

RUSSELL Crowe is a good friend of Richard Harris; he admires the older actor's "take on life".

Given that Harris is one of a handful of actors for whom the word "hellraiser" appears to have been invented (Peter O'Toole, Oliver Reed and Errol Flynn are the obvious others), it is, perhaps, no surprise that Crowe is such a fan of his Gladiator co-star.

Yet, the New Zealander may live to outdo them all. A further page was added to Crowe's Hollywood hellraiser cuttings file yesterday after reports that the 38-year-old had brawled with a fellow actor on the set of his latest film.

According to the Washington Post, Crowe's notorious volatility got the better of him again as he worked on The Far Side of the World during shooting in South America.

Crowe, who had to be restrained by a female colleague, had apparently not endeared himself to the rest of the cast at the opening party in Mexico by hurling the other actor across a bar.

"One cast member said Crowe had to be subdued by a muscular woman friend of another actor. She got him in a hammer lock," the newspaper reported.

Crowe stars as Captain Lucky Jack Aubrey, a ship captain travelling with a surgeon, who is played by his Beautiful Mind co-star Paul Bettany. It is not clear if the bar-room brawl was with Bettany, fellow co-star Billy Boyd (Pippin in Lord of the Rings) or another actor.

The incident is the latest in a long line of tantrums thrown by Crowe, who sprang to fame portraying the Roman warrior Maximus in Gladiator.

Earlier this year, he was forced to apologise to the British producer Malcolm Gerrie after publicly shoving and berating him at a party after the BAFTA awards, apparently because the televised version of the ceremony omitted a poem which Crowe had read in Harris's honour.

On the night before the ceremony, Crowe had organised a private party to pay homage to Harris - who played Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator - at the Dorchester hotel in London. At the dinner, Harris recited Sanctity, a poem by Patrick Kavanagh. Crowe was so taken with the verse that he quoted it in full in his acceptance speech after winning the best actor BAFTA for A Beautiful Mind. The BBC edited out Crowe's recital, and he pushed the director of the broadcast against a wall and jabbed him in the chest while shouting obscenities.

The following day, he called Harris and asked him: 'Would you have done the same thing?' Harris replied: 'There is one difference: I'd have punched him.'

Crowe and Harris became drinking friends after appearing together in Gladiator. "Others go to bed at 10 o'clock after they've put on their moisturiser and have their faces lifted," Harris said. "But Crowe is a man."

Yet their fellow Gladiator co-star, the late Oliver Reed, didn't impress Crowe. "I have little time for the Oliver Reeds of this business," he once said. "In fact, I never had a drink with Oliver because I didn't want to encourage him."

However, Crowe has repeatedly hurled abuse at reporters and photographers, and caused a brawl in Alberta, Canada, by telling timber workers that ice hockey was for wimps.

Last year he was accused of going on a rampage outside a nightclub in New South Wales, Australia. One man at the nightclub claimed Crowe sank his teeth into his neck, ripped out a chunk of flesh, spat it in his face and broke his thumb. Crowe denied the claims.

The Post said Crowe, who won the BAFTA's best actor for Gladiator and underpinned the success of A Beautiful Mind as best picture, "is suffering bouts of post-Oscar ego". "He has insisted that his personal hairdresser be flown first-class from Australia once a month to care for his slightly greying locks," the newspaper said.

Crowe is also a notorious womaniser, who was linked to the end of two showbusiness marriages. However, he insisted that he hooked up with Meg Ryan only after her split from Dennis Quaid and that Nicole Kidman was just a good friend.

But he has never denied his wild side. When asked if success was making him a monster, he replied: "Oh mate, I was a monster ten years ago."

Too young to die, too drunk to care

OLIVER Reed died, drink in hand, in a bar in Malta, while filming Gladiator. Arguably the acting fraternity's greatest hellraiser, he once asked: "I like the effect drink has on me. What's the point of staying sober?"

It was alleged that during the stag weekend prior to his second marriage, Reed downed 104 pints of beer. He was quick to dispel this rumour: "The event that was reported actually took place during an arm-wrestling competition in Guernsey 15 years ago."

Reed is often mentioned in the same breath as Peter O'Toole, whose first wife left him after labelling him "dangerous and disruptive", and Richard Harris, who famously remarked: "I drank, I screwed around, I made films I did not want to see, I took planes to places I didn't want to visit, I bought houses I didn't live in. I was numb and it didn't seem to matter."

Earlier this year, Harris - who twice had the last rites read to him - admitted: "The way I lived my life, it's a wonder I'm alive, let alone still working."

Rock 'n' roll, too, has delivered its fair share of hellraisers. Keith Moon, the long-time drummer for The Who, once drove a Lincoln car into a Holiday Inn swimming pool. He died of a drugs overdose in 1978. Liam Gallagher, who walked out of an Oasis tour of America after a bust-up with his brother, Noel, was told by a judge on the break-up with his wife, Patsy, that Miss Kensit could not reasonably be expected to put up with his outrageous behaviour.