Russell Crowe

All three of the British Film Institute passes on Russell Crowe fall inside two years. Mark Kermode, reviewing The Insider in 1999, finds the transformation startling, remembering him as the once lithe star of muscular vehicles like Romper Stomper; what exactly changed is left unsaid, so it stays unsaid here too. A year later Andrew O'Hehir likens another film's hero to the Gladiator version of him, a man with nothing on his mind but the woman he left behind. Geoffrey Macnab describes an opening in which his kidnap specialist faces down Chechen militia and a Russian soldier. After 2000 the archive goes quiet. He is credited once as a director with us, on The Water Diviner in 2014, a film he also stars in.