Age: 62
male
Russell Ira Crowe (born April 7, 1964) is a New Zealand actor and film director. His work on screen has earned him various accolades, including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and a British Academy Film Award. Crowe was born in New Zealand, spending ten years of his childhood in Australia and residing there permanently by age 21. He began acting in Australia and had his break-out role in Romper Stomper (1992). He gained international recognition in the late 1990s for his starring roles in L.A. Confidential (1997) and The Insider (1999). Crowe gained wider stardom for playing the title role of Gladiator (2000), which earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Further acclaim came for portraying real-life mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. in A Beautiful Mind (2001). Crowe then starred in several films in the 2000s, including Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Cinderella Man (2005), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), American Gangster (2007), State of Play (2009), and Robin Hood (2010). Crowe has since appeared in the films Les Misérables (2012), Man of Steel (2013), Noah (2014), and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022). In 2014, he made his directorial debut with the drama The Water Diviner, in which he also starred. Aside from acting, Crowe has co-own the National Rugby League (NRL) team South Sydney Rabbitohs since 2006.
Russell Crowe
William rankin
for William rankin in The man who rode thunder
Suggested by deeceee1990
William Rankin was a World War II and Korean War veteran, and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps. In 1959, he was routinely flying a F-8 jet fighter when the engine failed, right as he was passing over a cumulonimbus cloud, erupting into a thunderstorm. He very calmly ejected, having previously bailed out of a jet whilst under enemy fire in Korea, and headed straight into the cloud. Due to intense decompression, he started bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth. His abdomen also began to swell up, causing a massive amount of discomfort. He immediately suffered frostbite due to the sub-zero temperatures of the cloud. He gasped up as much oxygen as he could, resisting the urge to deploy his parachute, as it would later self-deploy at a safe-breathable altitude. When his 'chute finally popped, continuous updrafts battered him up and down in the air for countless minutes, until at one point he vomited. In the midst of the cloud, he had to hold his breath so as not to choke on all the suspended water and drown in mid-air. Hailstones pelted his body. Lightning flashed all around him, lighting up his parachute (at one point leading him to believe he had died), whilst thunder that he couldn't hear but feel shook his body senseless. Eventually he emerged from the cloud and sailed on a gust of wind headfirst into a tree - luckily, he was still wearing his helmet. He got up, shook it off, checked his watch and deduced that he had been in the air for forty minutes. To cap it all off, he walked through the woods of North Carolina until he passed a road where a car picked him up. His wounds extended as far as mild bruising, frostbite and decompression shock
