He looked well on his way to a career of playing agitated heavies, then turned left, making a diverse array of choices best displayed in the trio of films for which he was nominated for Oscar gold: as a tobacco-industry whistleblower in The Insider; as a brilliant yet schizophrenic mathematician in A Beautiful Mind; and as a revenge-seeking Roman general in Gladiator, which garnered him a statuette in 2000. But all of that was a long time ago, and Crowe’s career has been inconsistent ever since.