Russell Ira Crowe

Crowe was born in Strathmore Park, a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, on 7 April 1964, the son of film set caterers Jocelyn Yvonne (née Wemyss) and John Alexander Crowe. John also managed a hotel. Jocelyn's father, Stan Wemyss, was a cinematographer who was awarded an MBE for filming footage of World War II as a member of the New Zealand Film Unit. Crowe is Māori and identifies with Ngāti Porou through a maternal great-great-grandmother. John's father, John Doubleday Crowe, was a Welshman from Wrexham, while another of Crowe's grandparents was Scottish. Crowe's other ancestry includes English, German, Irish, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish. He is a cousin of former New Zealand national cricket captains Martin and Jeff Crowe and the nephew of cricketer Dave Crowe. At the age of four, Crowe moved to Australia with his family, settling in Sydney, where John and Jocelyn pursued their career in film set catering. Jocelyn's godfather was the producer of the Australian television series Spyforce, and Crowe was hired for a line of dialogue in one episode of the series at the age of five or six, opposite series star Jack Thompson. Later, in 1994, Thompson would play the supportive father of Crowe's gay character in the film The Sum of Us. Crowe also appeared briefly in the series The Young Doctors. In Australia, he was educated at Vaucluse Public School and Sydney Boys High School before moving back to New Zealand with his family in 1978. He continued his secondary education in Auckland, attending Auckland Grammar School and Mount Roskill Grammar School before leaving school to pursue his ambitions as a performer. In 2015, it was reported that Crowe had applied for Australian citizenship in 2006 and again in 2013 but was rejected because he failed to fulfill the residency requirements. However, Australia's Immigration Department said it had no record of any such application by Crowe.