Another bad hair day

Russell Crowe took to the red carpet for the State of Play British premiere on Tuesday night looking rather dapper dressed in a sharp grey suit with freshly shorn hair. But those impressed by this clean-cut image might be shocked when they watch his turn as journalist Cal McAffrey in the film. On this big screen outing, Crowe has a haircut that looks like it is deep fat fried of a morning. It tickles his ears like a filthy shawl.

He has one of those ghastly mullets that didn’t look good even when they adorned rock stars in the 1980s. At times in the film, it’s so distracting that the mind begins to wonder what the greasy mop, rather than the character, might to do next. When it becomes clear that he’s had an affair with Robin Wright Penn’s Anne Collins, you wonder whether she broke off the tryst when he decided to use castor oil instead of gel in his hair.

All the more disturbing is that at first glance Crowe’s mop is not bad on purpose. Contrast Crowe’s look with that sported by David Morrissey in the forthcoming Is Anybody There?, set in the 1980s, the heyday of the mullet. Morrissey is clearly just out to obtain maximum laughs with his coiffure. It’s the same problem with a whole wave of Eighties tribute movies. To see truly awful Eighties cuts in their full glory, one only needs to rewatch Desperately Seeking Susan and St Elmo’s Fire.

In a lot of ways, Crowe’s cut is worse than Javier Bardem’s Prince Valiant number in No Country for Old Men, a haircut that was as talked about as much as anything else that took place in the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning picture. At the very least, Bardem’s cut was so unique, it gave the serial killer Anton Chigurh his necessary edge. It was, though, just too unusual to qualify as terrible; it was more quirky than bad. Still, co-star Josh Brolin would later reveal (in one of many discussions about the hair un-style), that Bardem complained “I’m not going to be laid for three months” as he left the salon. And this from Penelope Cruz’s boyfriend.

At least Bardem could blame No Country for Old Men hairstylist Paul Leblanc for the awful chop, apparently inspired by paintings of medieval knights. The New Zealand-born star of State of Play has only himself to blame. Director Kevin Macdonald approached Crowe to appear in his cinema adaptation of the BBC TV drama when original star Brad Pitt withdrew two weeks before the shoot was scheduled to start. At the time, Crowe was adamant that he could not cut his hair because he had been growing it for two years to star in Ridley Scott’s version of Robin Hood. He even had an argument with Macdonald over the director’s coiffure-related demands.

The actor had his hair in a ponytail when he was first approached but the director didn’t think that it was a suitable look. They eventually agreed on the layered mullet compromise.

There are some actors one just expects to have terrible hair. Nicolas Cage springs to mind. He started with a new romantic tribute cut in Valley Girl, moving on to a spiky quiff in Peggy Sue Got Married, Seventies porn-star chops and ’tache in Raising Arizona (the Coen brothers seem to delight a little in degrading their leading men), a mullet in Con Air, an afro in Adaptation, some bad straggly locks in Bangkok Dangerous, and, lest we forget, an unfortunate flat-top toupee in Ghost Rider. Melanie Griffith might be his female equivalent, having sported an unforgettable Eighties bouffant in Working Girl.

Wigs have caused actors innumerable problems over the years. Richard Burton and Colin Farrell could start a war over who was given the worst wig when they played Alexander the Great almost 50 years apart. The mix of beehive and dreadlocks that John Travolta wore in Battlefield Earth is enough to put anyone off Scientology, while Sean Penn came up with a corking frizzle as part of his elaborate masquerade in Carlito’s Way. Then there are the actors that always don toupees with mostly bizarre results, such as Sir Ian McKellen, John Wayne and Kevin Spacey.

Sir Ben Kingsley has recently been a one-man parade of how not to accessorise your pate. For The Wackness, he argued that his hairdo seemingly modelled on Gaudi’s unfinished Sagrada Familia was necessary for the role. “I sort of saw Squires with wires coming out of his head, as if the madness couldn’t be contained in his skull, that he had to have a halo of unruly hair around his head.” I’d like to see his excuse for the bowl cut he sports as a British policeman in the new film Fifty Dead Men Walking.

The rationale actors use to justify their salon cuts deserves its own place in cinema history. One that still tickles is the famously beautiful Susannah York’s assertion that to play the plainlooking Jane Eyre in 1970, all she needed to do was part her hair down the middle. She claimed it made her feel ugly and if she felt ugly, she’d look ugly. She parted her hair, and predictably her looks were undiminished. Cameron Diaz, on the other hand, eschewed her Californian blond locks when making an effort to assert her credentials as a serious actress, adopting an appalling mousy frizz for Being John Malkovich.

It’s all a far cut from the Hollywood Golden Age work at MGM studios of Sydney Guilaroff, who wrote Crowning Glory: Reflections of Hollywood’s Favourite Confidant, a memoir which describes how he snipped and primped his way into the beds of Greta Garbo and Ava Gardner. Now Russell Crowe has his own entry into the bad crops hall of fame. Perhaps he knew it was a joke all along. He plays a journalist who is behind the times, and his clothes, including an unfortunate stained mackintosh, are as behind the times as his hair. Could it be that despite playing a stalwart journalist, the type that movies such as Sweet Smell of Success and All the President’s Men used to champion, that Crowe couldn’t help displaying his disdain for hacks by looking bad?

At the premiere of Body of Lies last year, he complained about his long hair: “I hate it – it’s like having a dead koala on your back.” Clearly a man who suffers for his art.

What’s the worst haircut you’ve ever seen on screen? Add your comments below