In
an unusual display of public affection, Russell greets wife Danielle at LA
airport / Pic: Splash Source: The Sunday Telegraph
Annette Sharp, The Daily Telegraph, reports
She was as patient as a dutiful wife could be but in the end Danielle Spencer realised she and her husband of nine years, Russell Crowe, were vastly different people who wanted different things from life.
Their marriage didn't end in a week, or a month or even a year. It seems the fabric of their celebrity union started fraying years earlier - perhaps 17 years earlier - when their first attempt at romance foundered after he packed his bags and quit Australia, and her, for Hollywood.
The pair initially met on the set of the Australian film The Crossing in 1989 when he was the unknown and she had the higher profile thanks to an ongoing role on TV's The Flying Doctors. The couple, then 25 and 21, had a passionate affair that lasted five years but their relationship could not survive his success and huge ambition.
They parted as friends, they said at the time, yet her friends claimed Crowe had been"insensitive" to Spencer. From the set of her soap Pacific Drive came whispers they had been having rows.
With the success of 1992's Romper Stomper behind him, the determined and impatient Crowe struck out in search of fame, wealth and its considerable trappings - which would include romances with co-stars including Sharon Stone and Kim Basinger.
When the actor finally ricocheted back into Spencer's life in 2001, his relationship with Hollywood darling Meg Ryan, his Proof Of Life co-star, was smouldering at his feet.
The actor, by then a two-time Oscar nominee, was suffering untold damage to his public image after being labelled the home-wrecker who ended Ryan's 10-year marriage to actor Dennis Quaid.
What he needed was a public relations miracle to move on from the scandal that was engulfing him. What he got was the restoration of his image through his reunion with his former sweetheart, Spencer.
After five years apart, the soulmates were back together and the actor, by then also known for his angry outbursts, was immediately grounded.
In April 2003 they married at his Nana Glen farm. Eight months later their first son, Charlie, was born.
The marriage largely restored him but only time would tell if it could sustain his huge appetite for conquest and stardom.
The great thaw between Crowe and Spencer is said to have started in earnest two years ago as Spencer realised that despite her love for her career-obsessed film star husband, he would never be completely satisfied with a humble life in Sydney's suburbs. Not for long at least.
Having put her career on hold for the best part of a decade to raise Charlie, now 8, and brother Tennyson, 6, Spencer, too, itched to return to her music career.
She also wanted to move her family out of the $14 million seven-bedroom, six-bathroom, three-kitchen, glass-fronted Woolloomooloo apartment that had been their home since April 2003 and into a traditional freestanding home in Sydney's burbs.
From 2007 to 2010 the couple searched, with a large and increasingly frustrated team of real-estate experts, for a family home in the eastern suburbs that would meet their privacy requirements.
From day one, Crowe didn't share his wife's enthusiasm for the quest. Each time Spencer found what she thought to be a suitable home, Crowe would mount a stiff argument against buying.
Le Manoir, a palatial Bellevue Hill property owned by the French government and later bought by Lachlan Murdoch, was deemed too expensive and needed too much work. The $50 million asking price for waterfront Point Piper mansion Altona was considered by Crowe to be insane.
The Bellevue Hill home of the late Lady Sonia McMahon was too rundown. The Woollahra home of Carla Zampatti's ex, John Spender, too accessible to paparazzi and the yard deemed too small.
As the list of rejected properties grew, it became clear to Spencer (and a dozen Sydney real-estate agents) that Crowe was in no hurry to compromise his own values for hers.
"The reality was, he didn't want a family home. He wanted to stay in his bachelor pad living his jetset lifestyle," an observer said this week.
Finally, in March of 2011 the couple bought Te Puke, a pretty six-bedroom Federation home on 1200 square metres overlooking the Royal Sydney Golf Club in Rose Bay.
At last she had her dream home. Crowe told neighbours he had no intention of giving up his apartment to live there and then hopped on a plane bound for China.
Having spent five months of 2009 in the UK, family in tow, shooting Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, and the second half of the year in Pennsylvania filming The Next Three Days, he committed to spending 2010 close to home. By the time the Rose Bay house had been bought, he was champing at the bit to return to work and signed on in quick succession for six back-to-back films through 2011 and 2012.
As Spencer started planning the move into Rose Bay, Crowe relocated to Hong Kong to shoot the kung-fu film The Man With The Iron Fists. As the removalist trucks were unpacking her new french provincial furniture, he was en route to Vancouver to start filming Man of Steel.
By November she and the boys were settled in their new house - and he was in the US on the set of Broken City with Mark Wahlberg.
While she negotiated a career comeback with the Seven Network's Dancing With The Stars, he was preparing to step into the role of Javert in Les Miserables, to be filmed in the UK from February to June.
By the time paparazzi photos emerged of her sharing a comfortable embrace with her Dancing partner Damien Whitewood in June, he was wrapping Les Mis and preparing to start shooting Noah on two continents from July.
The tension between the couple has even also been apparent at their boys' exclusive eastern suburbs school, with parents noting the couple have refused to mingle with fellow parents, either obsessively protective of their privacy or just plainly "out of sorts" when at the school.
"She won't talk to other mothers during drop-off and he crouches in a corner with his sons resisting other parents' efforts to introduce themselves to him," said the parent of one of Tennyson's kindergarten classmates this week.
Having lived apart for 12 months, they are understood to have formally separated in July after she and the boys flew to LA for one last show of solidarity.
Crowe is said to have been blindsided by her determination to separate and reluctant to accept it.
"Don't be surprised when he mounts a campaign to win her back. He knows he will never replace her," a friend said this week.
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