But when BBC Radio 4 presenter Mark Lawson asked him about it, Crowe replied: “You have your ears dead, mate, if you think it’s an Irish accent.”
“Evidence of that,” Lawson replied.
Irish do you say? Your ears are dead, mate.
“Bollocks,” Crowe replied, abruptly ending the interview a few minutes later.
The implicit insult clearly annoyed for years because in 2018 Crowe went on Twitter to explain what was going on with his Robin Longstride in Ridley Scott’s film.
“A child born in Barnsley, after the death of his father brought to France at the age of six, travels on foot through Europe to the Middle East, fighting in the Third Crusade for Richard I alongside men from all sides from Britain, Ireland and France, and finally a man in his 40s returns to England, “he wrote. This supposedly explained any slight hesitation in the dialect that anyone with dead ears would have imagined, wrongly, of course, he could detect.
Loading
Crowe has been willing to try an accent almost from the start and, to be fair, usually does a pretty solid job. But in the early 1990s he almost died in the wells of a Welsh film in Australian comedy. Love of Limbo.
According to the book by James L. Dickerson Russell Crowe: The Unauthorized BiographyCrowe decided to model his accent on Anthony Hopkins, with whom he had just made the film Spotswood. And so, “at his own expense, Russell went to Wales and spent a couple of weeks living in a small town so that he could absorb the rhythm and tonal subtleties of the Welsh accent.”
If it’s been worth the effort it’s questionable, boy.
But age has not tired him, and in his next film Prizefighter: The Life of Jem Belcher, Crowe again seems to be making an Irish accent. But is it really?
Loading
The character he plays, Jack Slack, was born in England and was known as “the butcher of Norfolk”. According to cyberboxingzone.com, Slack “was strong and a very hard hit, but he was clumsy and didn’t have good boxing skills.”
Unfortunately, their propensity (or not) for accents is not noticed.