Guy Pearce

Biography

For all its Oscar-winning qualities, the film LA Confidential had another claim to fame. With hindsight, we can see it to have been the launching-pad for two huge new stars - Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. They were both antipodean, both fine actors, both good-looking leading men, but extremely different in character and approach. Crowe was tough on the outside, but sensitive and turbulent within, and a very hard worker. Pearce, on the other hand, was tremendously well-balanced and instinctive in his work, keeping research to a minimum. Crowe, of course, would storm to worldwide fame with The Insider and Gladiator. Yet, with Memento a big critical hit and The Time Machine topping the box-office charts, Pearce soon joined him in the upper echelons of Hollywood. Here's how he got that far.

Like Crowe, Guy Pearce is a famous Australian who's not actually from Australia. He was born on the 5th of October, 1967, in Ely, just to the north-east of Cambridge. His father, Stuart, had been in the New Zealand air force, and moved to the UK to work with the RAF. The family then moved briefly to Bristol and then, when Guy was 3, Stuart took them to Australia, specifically to Geelong in Victoria, about an hour's drive south of Melbourne. There they would spend the next 5 years - Stuart, his English wife Anne (a teacher specialising in needlework and home economics), Guy and his mentally retarded older sister Tracey.

Stuart was the chief test pilot on the Nomad programme. On the morning of the 6th of August, 1976, his plane crashed shortly after take-off from the Avalon airfield, near Geelong. He was only 39. His death made headlines across the country and, of course, affected the Pearce family deeply. Anne decided to stay in Australia with the kids and Guy "had to grow up quickly". He was told he had to be responsible and - despite being desperately insecure about his own identity due to his father's mythic status - so he became. It's been said that it was Guy's identity problems and maybe the overwhelming sense of responsibility that made him so quick to assume the identities of others - that is, act. What's for sure is that, so Guy himself has said, he felt 100 years old.