Actors are used to playing other people – and not just on stage. Today’s Hollywood celebrities seem to be UN ambassadors one minute, novelists the next, and politicians every other Thursday. But there’s one role they love to play most of all – historian.
Whenever actors are interviewed about their roles in historical films or plays, they start talking about “all the research” they have done, and how their performances will help people “understand the true story” much better than if it were presented in some dull old book or musty lecture theatre. The latest celebrity to strut the boards as a Regius Professor of Modern History is none other than Russell Crowe, who we will shortly see starring in The Water Diviner, a movie about a man who travels to Turkey after the Battle of Gallipoli to try to find his three missing sons.
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