New Zealand-born Australian actor, whose commitment, intensity, and ruggedly handsome appearance helped win him an Academy Award for best actor in 2001.

At age four Crowe moved with his family to Australia. He was the son of film- and television-set caterers, and he made his acting debut at age six on Australian television in the wartime spy adventure series Spyforce. After returning to New Zealand in the late 1970s, Crowe cofounded the rock band Roman Antix, serving as songwriter, guitarist, and lead singer; the group later re-formed as 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, and in 2001 it released its second full-length compact disc, Bastard Life or Clarity. In the mid-1980s Crowe began performing in musicals, and from 1986 to 1988 he toured with The Rocky Horror Picture Show as the cross-dressing Dr. Frank N. Furter. In 1990 he started a film career, appearing in the war drama Prisoners of the Sun and The Crossing, a drama centred on a romantic triangle. In these early efforts, Crowe displayed an innate ability to inhabit the characters he portrayed and for his next film, Proof (1991), received a best supporting actor award from the Australian Film Institute (AFI). His career reached a turning point with Romper Stomper (1992), in which he played a menacing neo-Nazi. His performance earned him an AFI best actor award and attracted the attention of Hollywood. After starring as a gay man searching for love in The Sum of Us (1994), Crowe appeared in his first American film, the western The Quick and the Dead (1995). It had little success at the box office, however, like his series of Hollywood films that followed.

Crowe also earned critical approval as Captain Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), a seafaring epic based on the fiction series by Patrick O'Brian. In Cinderella Man (2005), he played real-life boxer James J. Braddock (Braddock, James J.), who staged a timely comeback to help his family out of financial hardship during the Great Depression. After portraying an outlaw in the western 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Crowe starred as an honest policeman working in a corrupt department who tries to bring a drug lord (played by Denzel Washington (Washington, Denzel)) to justice in American Gangster (2007). In 2008 he appeared as a CIA handler and family man in Body of Lies, which also starred Leonardo DiCaprio (DiCaprio, Leonardo).