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Herald Sun Sunday
Edition 1 FIRST SUN 17 SEP 2006, Page E03
Crowe's vintage year

After a false start in the failed movie Eucalyptus, compatriots Russell Crowe and Abbie Cornish share screen time at last.

RUSSELL CROWE doesn't say "I told you so" in as many words, but there's a certain satisfaction in his tone when he speaks of starring opposite his fellow Australian Abbie Cornish in his new romantic comedy A Good Year.

According to published reports, there was bad blood between the 42-year-old Oscar winner and the 24-year-old up-and-comer over Eucalyptus, the movie based on Murray Bail's novel, when Crowe engineered Nicole Kidman to play the female lead, originally written as a 19-year-old character.

The movie eventually was scuttled without a scene being shot.

Now, while Crowe stops short of claiming credit for the casting of Cornish in A Good Year, he does not deny that he might have suggested that director Ridley Scott cast an eye over Cate Shortland's 2004 film Somersault, in which Cornish stars, before deciding on someone to play a young American in search of her father.

"It's always going to be Ridley's decision because he's the director, he's the boss, but I thought she deserved a meeting or at least a conversation, or that Ridley should have a look at her work," says Crowe, speaking at the Toronto Film Festival this week.

Scott, who directed Crowe's Academy Award-winning performance in Gladiator (2000) and now is working with him again on American Gangster, did watch Somersault and was quickly convinced.

"He made the decision to bring her on board, which I thought was great, because we had just had a situation in Australia with a movie that hadn't gone ahead and there was a lot of incorrect information in the press about how we might feel about each other, or whatever," Crowe says.

"So it was really good just to throw all that stuff away and be on the same set together and work. And, you know, from my position as well, being there when she's doing her first international film and just sort of letting her know she was being looked after and stuff like that, it was great."

A Good Year, based on the novel by Peter Mayle, stars Crowe as Max Skinner, a take-no-hostages London investment banker who inherits a small vineyard in Provence, France, where he grew up with his closest blood relative, Uncle Henry (Albert Finney).

His first instinct is to sell at a wildly inflated price but, with his future in London suddenly under a cloud following some questionable bond transactions, Max reluctantly settles into life at the chateau which is now his - or is it?

Enter Christie Roberts (Cornish), who might have even closer blood ties to Uncle Henry - she claims to be his daughter from a brief relationship and under French law, might be able to also claim the chateau.

Romantic comedy is relatively unfamiliar territory for Crowe.

"There's a lot of laughs in Gladiator," he says playfully when asked about his lack of past comedic roles. "It wasn't sold that way, but that's why people went back to see it, because you chop somebody's head off the right way, it's f---ing funny."

He says the role in A Good Year stood out for him in part because he "liked the idea of exploring the Anglo-Franco dynamic", as his character gradually sheds the trappings of his high-stress London life for the simpler pleasures of Provence.

"I've got a lot of English friends and French friends, and when they're together it's one thing, but when they're separate, there's another whole dialogue. They tend to tell me a little bit more of the truth, because I'm from Australia and New Zealand and outside of that argument," he said.

A Good Year, in fact, was one of two movies co-starring Cornish screened at this year's Toronto Film Festival. Neil Armfield's Australian film Candy, in which Cornish appears
opposite last year's Best Actor Academy Award nominee Heath Ledger and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, also was on show at the prestigious Canadian festival.

Following A Good Year, Cornish co-starred opposite another Australian Oscar winner Cate Blanchett in Shekhar Kapur's The Golden Age, to be released next year.

Blanchett reprises her career-making 1998 role as Queen Elizabeth I in the new film, which examines the relationship between the monarch and Sir Walter Raleigh, played by Clive Owen.

Cornish plays Raleigh's wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton.