Crowe a 'perfect gentleman' compared to some

Hollywood bad boy? How much sweeter can you get than trying to phone your wife and kid back home while toiling away in a foreign city?

Is it unreasonable, when staying in a US$3000 ($4210) a night New York hotel that brags it has three phones a room, to expect one that works?

Who wouldn't feel like throwing a phone if confronted by front-desk "attitude", especially if the time difference made it urgent, say, to get through before the little one's bedtime?

It was probably just Russell Crowe's way of reversing the charges.

Speaking of charges, eight years for assault and criminal possession of a weapon, in the form of a (fixed - until it was ripped out of the wall) telephone? Is it less for a mobile?

Does no one understand that actors need creative tension, and that some are better at it than others (being creatively tense, that is, not acting)?

Russell has a reputation for being terrific at both. But his off-screen playfulness is teddie-tantie stuff compared with the real bad boys.

The worst Russell has done is to get involved in the odd pub and restaurant scuffle, and to bail a British TV exec up against a wall after part of his Bafta-winning speech was cut for television.

Okay, so he had a fight in which he bit - just once - his bodyguard, former rugby league star Mark "Spud" Carroll. But the pair hotly disputed press reports that Crowe bit Carroll's ear.

It was his chest, they said, and fair enough, as Carroll was smothering him in a headlock at the time.

The incident took place during filming of Cinderella Man, in which Crowe plays a boxer. So is there something wrong with an actor totally immersing himself in a role?

And let's not concentrate on what Russell has done. Just look at what he has not done:

* been caught in a car with a hooker, like Hugh Grant;

* been jailed for assaulting an extra on-set, like Sean Penn, not to mention attacking reporters with a rock and shooting at press helicopters;

* taken a gun on a plane, or been involved in a drunken car chase, like Christian Slater, or bitten a policeman in the belly (a mate in the chest, maybe, but never a policeman in the belly);

* trashed hotel rooms, or lost two front teeth and been fined US$72,000 ($101,100) for a drunken brawl, like Oasis wild man Liam Gallagher;

* taken himself in hand at an adult theatre, like Pee-Wee Herman;

* been mysteriously murdered in a hotel room, like Hogan's Heroes sex addict Bob Crane.

Not a bit of it. Crowe was a "perfect gentleman", according to one New York cop, even while he was being cuffed. And like all perfect gentlemen, he apologised. "**** me, I'm sorry," were his words, according to the cop.

Perhaps we could all be a little more tolerant towards actors, like Cinderella Man director Ron Howard, who compared working with Crowe to shooting on a tropical island.

"You know the weather is going to change," Howard said.

"Russell is an intense guy. It might look like clouds have rolled in. It might get tense for a second. But the sun will shine."

- AAP