Russell Crowe - before the fame

When Russell Crowe, hands cuffed behind him, was paraded before the cameras in New York this week, his gait was stiff, his torso rigid, his face expressionless. It was the polar opposite of the swaggering bravado we have seen from him these past 10 years and I couldn't help thinking of the first and only time I met him.

Groucho Marx once said he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin; I met Russell Crowe before he was famous, and before he was a bully and a brat and a thug.

There is something bleakly instructive about the fact that Russell Ira Crowe is more famous than the characters he has played. The mathematician John Forbes Nash jun (in A Beautiful Mind), for example, or the tobacco-industry nemesis whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (in The Insider) each contributed more to humanity than Crowe will in a lifetime but until Crowe incarnated them on screen, they were unknown to most people. That's the fame game for you.

Crowe's name is in the headlines again for all the wrong reasons. The Wellington-born, Australian-based actor appeared in the Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday after allegedly throwing a telephone at a receptionist in a swanky New York hotel.

He was remanded until September on charges of assault and "criminal possession of a weapon" (the telephone). The offences carry a maximum penalty of eight years' jail.

This is not the first time Crowe has demonstrated an inability to keep his temper in check. In 2002, he exchanged blows with Kiwi multi-millionaire Eric Watson in the men's room of an expensive London restaurant. The next year, upset that his acceptance speech was edited in the Bafta Awards telecast, he roughed up the producer.

Other unwitnessed allegations of Crowe's punchiness included one by the singer Moby, who said Crowe attacked him in a nightclub. And he was captured on videotape fighting in a bar near his Australian ranch.

All the practice isn't helping much. When he took unsuccessful legal action against two men who, he said, blackmailed him over the tape, one of them commented at the trial that "he's belted three people and they've all stood there and there's, like, nothing wrong with 'em".

The irony that Crowe plays a boxer in his latest film, Cinderella Man, the one he was in New York to publicise, will have escaped few. But the star was watching some real boxers in Manchester less than 24 hours before the New York fracas. Britain's Daily Telegraph reported that Crowe was seated near the press seats when Ricky Hatton took the junior welterweight world title from the Australian-based champion Kostya Tszyu. The paper described Crowe as "gulping in the crowd's fervour and the violence of the bout itself.

"After climbing into the ring and thumping his chest with his fist," the report said, "Crowe belted out [the Australian national anthem] and raised his chin like Maximus in Gladiator to smell the venom from the audience."

There has been plenty of comment about Crowe's need for anger management although until this week it appeared that marriage and, at Christmas, fatherhood, had calmed him down a bit.

But I can't help wondering whether the punchiness isn't all of a piece with the arrogance that too often comes with fame and allows the famous to treat people like dirt.

Ask Vanessa Boni, who was working as a waitress at a London party to celebrate the release of Crowe's movie, Master and Commander. She approached the star with a tray of salmon nibbles and he told her to "**** off with your ******* salmon".

This was not the man I met in 1991 when he was in New Zealand to publicise the excellent Australian black comedy Proof. It was his third film and his second starring role but he was far from being a household name. His big breakthrough - as the skinhead thug Hando in Romper Stomper - was more than a year away.

He was quietly delighted the Herald was taking an interest in his visit. He was chuffed when I said I had enjoyed his performance - as a dish-washer who befriends an embittered blind man (played by Matrix villain Hugo Weaving). Dressed in torn jeans and a battered leather waistcoat, he smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and spoke softly, shyly, thoughtfully.

I engineered a meeting between Crowe and his cousins, the cricketers Martin and Jeff, whom Russell hadn't seen since boyhood. He was more than a little in awe of them and so was I apparently: the clipping contains a story about a wannabe actor meeting a pair of famous cricketers.

Jeff, always one of nature's gentlemen, cracked jokes and tried to ease Russell's obvious shyness. The actor, smoking nervously, almost surreptitiously, stood to one side as we waited for the star of the show to arrive. 

Martin was then at the peak of a career that was always slightly more promising than stellar, but he was certainly a star. And he knew how to act like one. He arrived late, without apology. He barely made eye contact with the slightly supplicating Russell.

He reluctantly posed for our photographer. As soon as he could, he remarked that it was "******** cold. I'm outta here" and left. Russell gazed after him, his face a mixture of gratitude, humiliation and pride.

If there were an overarching lesson in all this, all famous people would be insufferable. But it's plainly not the case. Journalism - a career which, Sir Peter Ustinov once remarked, allows you to "meet lots of famous people without the slightest obligation to take them seriously" - brings its practitioners repeatedly face to face with the famous.

And most journalists know that celebrity is a guarantee neither of pleasantness or unpleasantness.

For every Sir Neville Marriner (utterly charming) is a Jeffrey Archer (not); for every P.J. O'Rourke (bumptious and smug) is a Harvey Keitel (thoughtful, generous, kind).

Martin Crowe may be wiser now he's older. Russell Crowe, by contrast, seems to have spent the past decade losing the wisdom he had. However things play out in Manhattan in September, he should reflect that his rap sheet is already way too long.

He should take a listen to the old Alain Toussaint/Little Feat song which enjoins us to remember that "the same people you abuse on your way up, you might meet up / On your way down".