Modest Crowe has midas touch

'When I started out, I did seven movies in a very short space of time. I played everything from your iconographic Australian characters (The Crossing), to skinheads (Romper Stomper) to a gay plumber (The Sum Of Us) to an anally retentive Welsh baptist virgin (Love In Limbo), and after seven movies I realised that if I didn't expand where I was working I was going to have to start repeating characters.'

Expanding meant heading for America and after The Quick And The Dead, with Sharon Stone, and Virtuosity, with Denzel Washington, his breakout role was playing the violent cop Bud White in the superb L.A. Confidential which proved to Hollywood that Crowe could deliver. And some. Although he spends months at a time in Los Angeles, he has never moved there, preferring instead to go back to his 750-acre farm in northern New South Wales where his parents, Jocelyn and Alex, live with his older brother, Terry.

He first bought a 100-acre plot with a 'shack' on it some five years ago. Since then he has snapped up more land and turned it into his own private haven. 'I love it. We've got cattle, a few horses, a family of wallabies in one of the paddocks - and plenty of space. I'm away a lot but when I'm there it gives me everything. It's big enough for me to get some solitude. I can just wander off and walk for miles.

'My life, when I'm working, is people-intensive, so I like the chance to be on my own, especially at the farm. But at the same time the place can accommodate every special person in my life - my family, my friends. We can all be there together and that's great.'

Something of a workaholic, when he's not making movies Crowe is usually to be found playing with his band, Thirty Odd Foot Of Grunts, the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary film, Texas, screened at the Berlin Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. Crowe knows, of course, that actors-cum-musicians are usually seen as something of a joke. He points out that he was a musician before he was an actor - his early career in New Zealand and Australia combined both with roles in Grease and The Rocky Horror Show - and that this band, in one form or another, dates back to 1984, long before fame and fortune came calling.

'We're a good band and we will continue to grow. But I don't want it to be shoved down people's throats so they resent it. And, you know, that's OK. I understand that cynicism and I think you should take everything, where actors are singers, singers are actors, with a pinch of salt.

'However, every now and then it does happen. Thirty Odd Foot Of Grunts is not going to change the face of music as we know it, but it is a more than decent band with a more than decent collection of songs that are poignant and real.'

He isn't, however, about to give up the day job. In A Beautiful Mind, his compassionate, moving portrayal of John Forbes Nash Jr and his descent into a delusional hell, has won praise from mental-health experts in America. Loosely based on Sylvia Nasar's book on Nash, the film has, however, also drawn criticism for taking some liberties with the truth. Nash, a mathematical genius who revolutionised established thought on game theory and the mathematics of competition, was a brilliant, if eccentric, Princeton student with a dazzling future ahead of him. After college he worked for the intelligence services in Cold War America and met and married the beautiful Alicia (Jennifer Connelly).

For a while, it seemed that Nash had all he could possibly wish for. But then, illness took over and Nash was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and for decades was lost in a delusional world of his own. His wife stood by him through those troubled years and eventually Nash recovered to rebuild his life. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994.

In America, some critics have complained that the film neglects some key issues - Nash's alleged sexual liaisons with men, the fact that he and Alicia divorced before getting back together again and Nash's singular political views. For Crowe, they are missing the point. Ron Howard's film is, he says, essentially a love story.

'We are not telling the full story of Nash's life and the film-makers have been clear about that from the outset. We were trying to take the audience to a place where they are imagining and seeing life the way that he did. And I think that without going to any places of untruth we've taken the essence of the story and put it in front of people. And you have a limited time in a feature film to tell the whole story, the absolute story of a life.

'But the point of it is that this guy faced this disease, schizophrenia, and over time learnt to control it and came out the other side to tell the tale. And for me, the relationship between John and his wife, Alicia, was so strong and compelling. It wasn't just a film that dealt with mental illness or talked about this genius, a man who won the Nobel Prize. It was a great romance, it was this wonderful, committed relationship that lasted through it all.'

Russell Crowe drops in to Hampstead