There’s no pleasing some people. Roused from his hotel room in Berlin to be told he’d scooped his third Oscar nomination in as many years, Russell Crowe surprised a restive press conference with a confession that he still wasn’t quite satisfied with his acting career.

“It hasn’t changed anything about the way I work,” he said of this latest accolade. “I’m still unsatisfied to a large degree, but I think that’s a healthy thing to be as an actor.”

Any other actor would have been positively smug. Few others could even hope to pull in the crowds at the multiplexes for a movie about maths and madness.

Then, few others have Russell Crowe’s breadth of appeal. Widely tipped to win his second Oscar for his portrayal of schizophrenic mathematical genius and Nobel laureate John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, the New Zealand-born star has come to be regarded as one of cinema’s top leading men after his Oscar-wining performance in Gladiator.

To read more about Russell’s new film, his thoughts on stardom and his hopes for a family, check out this week’s HELLO! magazine, on sale now.