How much is Russell Crowe worth?
| Net Worth: | $100 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Actor |
| Date of Birth: | April 7, 1964 (age 58) |
| Country: | New Zealand |
| Height: | 5 ft 11 in (1.82 m) |
“I want to make movies that pierce people’s hearts and touch them in some way, even if it’s just for the night while they’re in the cinema; in that moment, I want to bring actual tears to their eyes and goosebumps to their skin.” Russell Crowe
About Russell Crowe
Russell Ira Crowe was born on 7 April 1964 and is an actor, film producer, director and musician with an estimated net worth of $100 million. Russell Crowe is an actor from New Zealand who rose to prominence in the 1990s. He is cousin of former New Zealand international cricketers Jeff Crowe and Martin Crowe. His ancestry includes English, German, Irish, Maori, Norwegian, Scottish, Swedish, Welsh, and 1/32 Italian.
Russell’s paternal grandfather originated from Wrexham, Wales. While his maternal great-grandmother, Erana Putiputi Hayes Heihi, was Maori, and as a result, he is registered on the Maori electoral roll in New Zealand. He was a rugby player in his youth and when he was only ten he lost his front tooth and never got it fixed until the director for The Crossing (1990), insisted that he do so, even paying out of pocket for the procedure. And just in the nick of time, his co-star in that movie was Danielle Spencer, who was to become his future wife some thirteen years later. In fact, they fell in love on set and eventually had two children together, Tennyson (2006) and Charles (2003).
Russell Crowe became one of the most bankable actors in Hollywood starting from about the year 2000. Even before that he had earned a small fortune in the movie business, but after earning $5 million for his role of Maixmus in Gladiator (2000), his earnings began to grow. Early roles like ‘Bud’ White in L.A. Confidential (1997) set him apart it was his dedication to still more roles that earned him his place as one to watch in Hollywood. By the time he was portraying the true life character of James J. Braddock, Crowe had already had three Oscar-nominations and one win.
Though he started his career in Australia acting in the local soap opera, Neighbours. Crowe broke in to Hollywood and wouldn’t be dethroned as the most famous Neigbours alum there until decades later when Margot Robbie arrived on American shores. Crowe was originally discovered by British actor and musical director/writer, Daniel Abineri. He gave Crowe his first professional acting role in a New Zealand tour of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That resulted in the title role in Crowe’s first stage musical, Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom, which premiered in Melbourne in 1989.
Known for his tough guy exterior and brawny physique, the actor often earns roles as high ranking officials, and several of Crowe’s most successful movies include major masculine roles, like his appearances in L.A. Confidential, American Gangster, and most famously, Gladiator. Which is interesting, considering he almost turned down the role of ‘Bud’ White in L.A. Confidential considering himself not brawny enough for the part.
Breaking Down Russell Crowes’ Net Worth
Crowe’s films have grossed over two billion dollars worldwide, so it is no surprise that he was once one of the most bankable film stars of all time. He himself of course also earned tens of million of dollars in the process, making his one of the most successful acting careers of all time.
In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Crowe was untouchable. Each new film earned him millions more than the last. His first big paycheck came with the release of Gladiator, for which he earned $5 million dollars. And as his profile literally skyrocketed, he earned an estimated $15 million for his lead in A Beautiful Mind. As well as another estimated $15 million for the lead in Cinderella Man, and an incredible estimated $20 million for the lead in Robin Hood (2010).
If it wasn’t for his determination and attention to details, he may never have been cast for Gladiator. Which would have not only affected his career in terms of earnings and awards but also his ability to be in position to be offered more matching roles, as well. What is noticed with people like Russell Crowe is that ahead of time they ‘win beforehand’ by putting in the work so that when the opportunity presents itself, they ace it.
Gladiator made $460.5 million worldwide, and off the heels of the period drama, the actor followed up with A Beautiful Mind, which earned $316.8 million. It was off the strength of roles like Maximus, that Crowe earned his movie star status and such a high paid career.
“I suppose ‘Gladiator’ could be a Western – if you were writing your review in Athens, that is! To be honest, we didn’t really think that way at the time. But there is common ground. And they both have horses – I liked that, obviously.” Russell Crowe
Cinderella Man was so popular that there were those who were even after Russell Crowe’s leather Cinderella Man jockstrap. Crowe has a history of selling his memorabilia and on this occasion it was $7,000 for the jockstrap used in the movie to mark the occasion that (apparently) people were bidding for.
It was an action packed making-of though, I will give you that. At a certain point during the training and shooting of the movie, Crowe dislocated his shoulder. The injury delayed filming for two months.
That same year, 2005, premiere magazine ranked him #49 on their list of the Greatest Movie Stars of All Time. The mid 2000s have been cited as the height of his acting career, in fact, the role of James J. Braddock (Cinderella Man (2005)) is his personal favorite.
Crowe also earned $5 million for his break out role in Gladiator and, also in 2000, he earned another $7.5 million for his role of Terry Thorne, in Proof of Life. Then fast forward to 2013, and he was paid $20 million to be Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander. That’s the equivalent to $24.1 million in 2022.
I look for the role that excites me and work with whoever that director happens to be, wherever he wants to shoot the film.
Russell Crowe
Crowe took violin lessons when preparing for his role of Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) and played the violin several times during the movie. As is like Russell, he also became good friends with Richard Tognetti, who gave him those violin lessons.
Interestingly, Crowe turned down the role of Logan/Wolverine in X-Men (2000) because apparently he did not want to play a similar role to Maximus in Gladiator (2000). Crowe who was maybe mistaken felt the character too close and so passed up a major role. Of course by that time it didn’t matter, because at the next Academy Awards it was Crowe who was collecting the Oscar for Best Actor. Something that may never have had happened if he opted to act in both movies.
On the night, Crowe proudly displayed his grandfather’s British Honours medal (MBE) while making his Oscar Winner speech.
In 2002, Premiere magazine ranked him #28 in their annual Power 100 List.
Crowe also turned down the role of Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The filming of Ron Howard‘s A Beautiful Mind (2001) was conflicting with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and so he decided to turn it down. Which is interesting because Crowe was thrilled with the idea of filming a movie in his home country, New Zealand. As history would record however, he made an Oscar-nominated performance in A Beautiful Mind and likely a far bigger cinematic impact in that movie, than he would have had in Lord of the Rings.
While his career was on the up and up, his personal life began to get into disarray. In November 2002, he got into a brawl in a London restaurant. After making a statement that he was “under a lot of stress” he said that he was going back to Australia to recover with his longtime girlfriend, Danielle Spencer.
Real Estate
Crowe loves Australia, he wasn’t born there, and while he is not actually an Australian citizen he emigrated to Australia at the age of four along with his family in 1968. He spent 10 years of his childhood there before moving back to live in Australia permanently at age 21, in 1985. The same year that he started his acting career. Crowe doesn’t like L.A. and while he has worked there for most of his career making roles, he has also said about the city, “I’d move to Los Angeles if New Zealand and Australia were swallowed up by a tidal wave, if there was a bubonic plague in England and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack.”
He loves Australia but as he explains in the video, he has not actually got Australian citizenship despite his many attempts.
In a nice waterfront location in Sydney, Crowe parted with US$9.2 million for a property in 2001. In 2003, after marrying his wife, Danielle Spencer, they purchased a penthouse in the city of Woolloomooloo for US$13.75 million. In 2011, in the harbourside eastern suburb of Sydney, Rose Bay, he bought a mansion. The same mansion that he signed over to Danielle as part of their divorce in 2018. Crowe had previously said “I didn’t get married to get divorced” but in the end, that is what happened.
“I’ve loved Danielle Spencer since 1989 – that’s never going to change – and that’s one of those things where I stare at her and go, ‘How did it fail?’ I still can’t work it out, because my feelings for her have never changed,” Russell Crowe.
At that time in his life, 2018, while he was going through the divorce with his co-star of The Crossing (1990). The same Danielle that he had met all those years ago, he held an auction called “The Art of Divorce”. A cleansing experience, perhaps. From it, he earned US$3.7 million from the sale of his various memorabilia that he had accumulated during his marriage.
He later sold the Sydney waterfront location he had purchased in Sydney in 2001 for US$11.5 million in 2013. Another property of Crowe’s had some burn damage after a close call with an Australian bushfire where it is located in New South Wales.
He also owns a 560-acre farm about 8 hours drive North-West from Sydney.
If you put 20 cents in me and ask me to talk about South Sydney, I’ll play all night.
Russell Crowe
He loves it in Australia and he won’t move. “I’ve been voted one of Australia’s 50 national treasures. I’ve even had my face on an Australian stamp – the only non-Australian to do so, apart from the Queen, of course,” he said.
Australia Post released the commemorative “Legends of the Screen” postage stamp which had Russell as himself and as his character Maximus from Gladiator in 2009.
Outside of real estate, but in business. In 2006 Crowe acquired a controlling stake in his favorite sports team, the Australian NRL team South Sydney Rabbitohs. This was through a partnership formed with Australian businessman, Peter Holmes.
Crowe is also a major fan of Leeds United Football Club, “I’ve followed Leeds since I was a little kid. I used to come home from sport in the afternoon, me and my brother, and watch ‘Match of the Day.’ I love the club. I want nothing but success for the club.”
Reasons Why Russell Crowe Is So Famous
Crowe had settled into his role in the famous Australian soap opera, Neighbours, in which he starred for four episodes. As Neighbours seems to be the trampoline that bounces Australian and New Zealand performers in to stardom (as Margot Robbie, Naomi Watts and Chris Hemsworth, among many others provide credence for) it wasn’t long after that when Crowe started turning heads in Tinseltown.
Crowe’s first leading role in a major movie was as Maximus in Gladiator, the Ridley Scott directed film that won countless awards and is often taught in film school as the perfect example of cinematography. The film was a huge success, and it started a Hollywood trend of making swords and sandals movies all over again. Based on the success of Gladiator, so many films in its wake were made about the Roman and other empires, Alexander for example came out in 2004, but earned only a little over one third of what Gladiator did.
After that, Crowe was being offered leading roles from every direction, and then went on to star in more award winning films such as American Gangster and A Beautiful Mind.
In the 2010s, Crowe joined a cast that included Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman in the film adaptation of one of the most successful plays of all time, Les Miserables.
Before its release, the film was dubbed to win virtually every award there is, and there was buzz about it being directed by Tom Hooper, who had made a name for himself after directing The King’s Speech. Surely enough, the movie was a massive hit and was adored by critics. However, critics had one shared criticism of the movie, as did audiences, which was Crowe’s performance, especially his singing, and in turn it became an Internet meme. Unfortunately at that time anyway, Crowe famous amongst a younger audiences for the wrong reasons.
He recovered though and American audiences certainly do love Crowe as he himself well knows. “The Americans love Aussies, but they’re actually quite afraid of us at the same time because they think we’re insane. Then they see our sports – league, union, and AFL – and that makes them even more worried,” he has said.
Crowe was targeted for comedy though, after his likeness was copied for the hit comedy show South Park. This also brought him a lot of fame from an audience that might not have been so well acquainted with who he was. The episode was viewed by millions of households in the US and may have been influenced by reports of Crowe getting in to fights which, according to Cafe Mom, there’s been a few.
Like everyone else, I’ve had moments when I’ve felt that I’ve been losing my grip.
Russell Crowe
At one point, the actor was even charged by the New York City police department with second degree assault for allegedly throwing a phone at a New York hotel employee, striking him in the face, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Aside from somewhat isolated outbursts how can one ignore Russell Crowe’s raw acting talent. Some of my favorite performances were Richie Roberts in American Gangster, John Nash in A Beautiful Mind and of course I was very entertained by Maximus (Spartacus) in Gladiator.
Reasons Why Russell Crowe Is So Successful
Crowe is naturally guarded and rarely open to interviews, he has also played characters with similar traits so perhaps they are quite true to life? He often plays characters of a high stature or characters determined to reach that stature, such as in Gladiator, Maximus who will stop at nothing to climb up the rankings of gladiators, hoping to earn his freedom, in order to avenge his wife and child. It’s thanks to this that he also fairs well in comedy movies, as he is cast as the bitter other half to the comic-relief’s sweetness. This is seen best in the buddy cop movie The Nice Guys, where his character of Jackson Healy offsets Ryan Gosling’s Holland March character’s goofiness with a gruff and seriousness.
Another clear trait that Crowe possesses is flexibility. While he may be slightly typecast as the tough, masculine Richie Roberts type character who does possessess some weaknesses. He has also played roles like the above mentioned Jackson Healy, as well, and let’s not forget, John Nash.
“For filmmakers who’ve made multiple movies, they have experience, but they only have experience of themselves as a filmmaker. Whereas I’m bouncing around from different skill sets: the organizational ability of Ridley Scott to the precision of a Ron Howard to the artistic sensibilities of a Peter Weir… to the scope of a Tom Hooper,” Crowe has said.
Ever since their shared success with Gladiator, Crowe and Ridley Scott have created a great working relationship together. The pair have worked on movies with one another several times since, with Crowe even co-producing some of them. These director-actor relationships are common in movie making. After all, it is a business and needs to make money; but more I feel the director and often producers see an opportunity to make their finest work and seize it. Another example of this is Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio.
In total, Ridley and Crowe made five films together. They include Gladiator, A Good Year, American Gangster, Body of Lies, and Robin Hood. It worked great, those five movies alone have combined box office earnings of over $1.2 billion!
A closer look at Russell Crowe’s true life character can be had by learning about the time he was cast as Bud White, in L.A. Confidential (1997). Crowe is a dedicated person who, after being cast for the part, read everything there was to know about his character in the book of the same name that the movie was based on. In the book he read that his character was the largest cop on the police force, which was off-putting for Crowe because despite what we see in the movies, he is actually of medium-sized frame and just under 6 feet tall.
So to capture the feel and presence of a “big guy”, Crowe decided to move into a tiny flat in which he could “barely fit through the doors”. He says, that made him come onto the set feeling like a giant and that was what came across on screen. This kind of attention to detail, creativity and willingness to go through some suffering is a key reason why Crowe has managed to succeed and earn so much money in the movie business while others have failed. He also said during his career, “I don’t really take vacations because when I’m working, it’s usually in a far-flung, exotic place somewhere. But I have a farm in Australia I like to go back to when I’m at home and not working.”
We can begin to see where his later success came from. He had originally considered backing out of L.A. Confidential when he thought that he couldn’t properly live up to the description in the book. He wouldn’t want to let audiences down just to book the part. However with greater use of his imagination, and clear resourcefulness, he found a way, and good for him that he did. L.A. Confidential is one of the films that has been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant.
Russell Crowe is very much an adventurer, an explorer. He has the courage to try things and step into things that may work out, but things that he couldn’t possible know would do before. This can be seen in his movie career but it can also be seen in his personal life. After filming Gladiator (2000), he made a 4,000 mile motorcycle trip around Australia with some friends. A monumental trip that gives us a looking-glass into what kind of a person Crowe really is.
Music
Not everybody knows this but in addition to his acting, Crowe is also vert musically talented. With the stage name Russ Le Roq, he has been performing music since the mid 1980s.
He started out in his home country of New Zealand and has since performed in many countries around the world. In 1984 he and his friend Billy Dean Cochran formed the band Roman Antix. It later became known as 30 Odd Foot of Grunts in 1992. The band has released three albums as well as a DVD.
The rock group, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, played their first American concert after Russell’s major success in the film, Gladiator (2000). It took place in Austin, Texas in August 2000, the tickets for the concert were sold via eBay and were priced at $500 each.
He and his band had performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992) but it was his first live concert performance in the USA.
In 2005, while filming Cinderella Man 2005 which was in Toronto. Crowe met lead singer of Great Big Sea, Alan Doyle. Working in Toronto and also in Australia, they composed several songs together, then later that same year, Doyle produced Crowe’s 2005 album My Hand, My Heart.
“I have a passion for music, and I enjoy the process of expressing myself within the parameters of a pop song, and I don’t do it to seek anybody’s approval, necessarily. Obviously, you go on stage, and you enjoy it when people respond to a particular song, but the overall concept of playing music I do for myself.” Russell Crowe
Jodie Foster is a close friend of Crowe’s and with his band he wrote a song about her called “Other Ways of Speaking”. He is also good friends with Nicole Kidman. In fact she even mentioned him in her Oscar acceptance speech when she won Best Actress for her role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002).
He was among the guests at Nicole Kidman’s and Keith Urban‘s wedding, in 2006. He is also close friends with Texas Governor, Rick Perry.
Awards
Russell Crowe is a highly decorated actor having been nominated three times for an Academy Award for Best Actor. First in 2000 for his portrayal of Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider (1999), then a year later in 2001 for playing Maximus in Gladiator (2000), following the trend he was nominated a third time in 2002 for his role as John Nash for A Beautiful Mind (2001). He won Academy Award for Best Actor in 2001 for his performance in Gladiator.
Two of those films are based on articles from Vanity Fair magazine. The Insider (1999) was based on a story by Marie Brenner called “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. A Beautiful Mind (2001) was published in Vanity Fair from Sylvia Nasar’s book about John Forbes Nash. Crowe also starred in Proof of Life (2000) which was based on the Vanity Fair article “Adventures in the Ransom Trade” by William Prochnau.
Crowes portrayal of Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider earned him position #23 on Premiere magazine’s “100 Greatest Performances of All Time” 2006 edition. A Beautiful Mind the film is position #93 on the American Film Institute’s “100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time” 2006 edition.
Crowe has appeared in six films that were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards: L.A. Confidential (1997), The Insider (1999), Gladiator (2000), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) and Les Misérables (2012).
Gladiator (2000) and A Beautiful Mind (2001) were of course the winning nominations.
Russell Crowe has also won 4 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, 1 BAFTA Award, 2 Golden Globes, 1 Screen Actors Guild Award, among many more critics awards.
For his services to Australian society and Australian film production, Crowe was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen’s New Years Honours List.
God bless America. God save the Queen. God defend New Zealand and thank Christ for Australia.
Russell Crowe
On April 12, 2010, he was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.
Summing-Up
Despite his reputation for being a bit rough around the edges, Russell Crowe built up solid relationships in Hollywood early on. He earned his way into the role of ‘Bud’ White, which included some of the top names in the industry, Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger and Danny DeVito. From his performance in the movie and in others, he caught the attention of Ridley Scoot who soon cast him in a role that would catapult him into almost immediate stardom, the role of Maximus in Gladiator (2000).
