Russell Crowe: Don't mess with the man in the leather skirt

He will be a week short of his 38th birthday when the Oscars come round at the end of March, and he still carries himself with a steadfast lack of charisma that you might expect in an electrician or a manual labourer on a movie set. But Russell Ira Crowe could easily grab his second Best Actor Oscar by the throat, mutter a few brusque words, and stroll away for several relieving beers.

The only actors who have ever done it twice in a row before are Tom Hanks, with Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, and Spencer Tracy – back in the 1930s – with Captains Courageous and Boys Town. Yet even the great Tracy begins to feel decidedly limited next to the expansiveness of Crowe.

Sure, Tracy could have played Bud White in L.A. Confidential (Crowe's break-out picture from 1997). Tracy could have managed the uneducated, rather brutalised emotional life in the city cop who gets the dirty jobs, but who still has a heart that can be broken. And I can just about believe that Tracy could have put on close to 50lbs and 20 years and turned himself into the paranoid, edgy, muddled whistle-blower, Jeffrey Wigand, for The Insider. I can even accept that Tracy could have become the hard-bitten professional negotiator for Proof of Life, and then so wowed his co-star Meg Ryan on location that her long-term marriage to Dennis Quaid was history before the film was over. After all, the rough edge in Tracy made him very attractive to women – they wanted to look after him.

But don't tell me that Spencer Tracy could have put on leather skirts and turned himself into the Roman general, Maximus, for Gladiator (Crowe's first Oscar success). One reason that Gladiator did so well was the utter conviction and muscle-power that Crowe brought to all those scenes of action. Indeed, in that one film he had put himself in the company of the screen's great athletes – people like Burt Lancaster, Errol Flynn, and even John Wayne.

So consider the audacity and the artistic ambition in this deliberately rough-mannered Antipodean that in his next film, A Beautiful Mind, which is this year's contender, he should be playing John Nash, mathematical genius, arrogant nerd, schizophrenic, break-down case and Nobel Prize winner. Last week Crowe won the Best Actor Golden Globe for A Beautiful Mind. So, to put it bluntly, in not much more than a year this guy has whipped both a large tiger and some of the most fiendish equations you're ever going to see in a motion picture.

We have seen chameleon actors before, of course, but the chameleon is so brilliantly versatile you have no doubts about its intentions – it wants to conquer the world. Russell Crowe has another attribute that both charms and bewilders Hollywood. Like the classic guy from Down Under, he's very happy to display his lack of education or couthness, his general disdain for all lifestyles and philosophies formed beyond Australia or New Zealand, and his merry, insolent scorn for the way things are done in Hollywood.

"I'd move to Los Angeles if Australia and New Zealand were swallowed up in a huge tidal wave," he once allowed grudgingly. "If there were a bubonic plague in England, and if the continent of Africa disappeared from some Martian attack. In Australia, they treat you like a piece of furniture. Your mates are your mates and the folks who hate your dark and bloody guts, they don't change their minds. That's why I love it, I suppose."

In other words, Hollywood is all very well, and two Oscars in a row would be sweet – like the salary level of close to $20m (£14m) a picture. But if you get down to essential realities, how many people in the Oscar theatre will know, or know how to rate it, that he is a cousin of the former New Zealand cricket captain, Martin Crowe?

In the wave of Antipodean talent that could break at these Oscars (with Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett all in contention, and with the careers of Mel Gibson, Geoffrey Rush, Heath Ledger, Guy Pearce and Hugh Jackman all being talked about), it's important to stress that Crowe has both Australian and New Zealand links. He was actually born in Wellington on 7 April 1964, and he has primary New Zealand citizenship. He even claims a fraction of Maori blood, as well as Irish and Norwegian ancestry.

His childhood was split between Australia and New Zealand because his parents ran a catering business that worked for movies in production. So the kid spent as much time collecting paper plates as he did in school. It was that hanging around on sets that got him his first acting job, aged seven, as Orphan in a TV series called Spyforce, and then a teenage role in the TV series Neighbours. He played some rugby and he still has an abiding passion to be a rock singer: for a while, he was Russ Le Roc, with a single record, "I Want to Be Like Marlon Brando".

Still, by the early 1990s, he was drawing a lot of attention in Australia as an actor – as a racist skinhead in Romper Stomper. That movie was seen in America and no less than Sharon Stone urged him to take a part in her spoof western, The Quick and the Dead. That was 1995, and a supporting part in Denzel Washington's Virtuosity was the one more step he needed on the way to L.A. Confidential.

Aiming yourself at Marlon Brando is a tricky business – not just because there are never enough good roles to meet the range of Brando's talent, but because Brando's strange "integrity" can easily make an actor a professional outcast in the picture business. For the moment, Crowe has Hollywood off-balance: he can do so much. He has such intense discipline, and yet he seems so unimpressed by Hollywood's rewards. He went through that tough regime to make himself Jeffrey Wigand, and then he took the weight off to be Maximus without complaint. His absorption in the role of John Nash startled and frightened other people on the set.

But then, as he relaxes, Crowe is likely to be gone – back to Australia, doing motor-bike tours of the Outback or just hanging out at his farm on the wilder shores of New South Wales. Crowe is resolutely unmarried, a known guy with the ladies. He earned a certain respect at the way he seemed to inhale Meg Ryan – a popular, very American figure – but then he lost interest in his conquest because she didn't want to spend endless days on the farm counting the beers. He is, as yet, a defiantly un-Hollywood figure, yet the town is reckoning with the need to see him as maybe the best actor in sight. It's a tricky situation, and no one doubts Rusty's ability to pick a fight.

With two Oscars in a row, he would be offered just about anything anyone wants to make. He might put more time into his own attempts to write scripts. He could become a very grand figure – or he might find that image too ridiculous to tolerate. Marlon Brando's lesson for all actors is that the better you are the shorter your honeymoon in the business. Somehow, I doubt that anything is going to tame Crowe or turn him towards obedience. Look for explosions.