Russell Crowe set to be the recipient of Taormina Arte Award

A new prestigious award is going to be added soon in the kitty of trophies of Academy Award winner Russell Crowe. He will be attending the 59th Taormina Film Festival which will honour him with the prestigious Taormina Arte Award.

Hollywood superstars like Michael Douglas, Oliver Stone, Robert De Niro, Liam Neeson and Tom Cruise have been the winners of this award in past. In 2000 while receiving this award Cruise promoted his blockbuster Mission: Impossible 2. But this year Crowe’s presence at the fest carries some special significance. The event corresponds with a huge leap in the Taormina film industry. Filmmaker Mario Sesti will be transforming Taormina into a mainstream film society where along with genre pictures, auteur movies will also be kept in the limelight, as reported by Variety.

As told by Sesti, “’From A Beautiful Mind’ to ‘Gladiator’, from Master and Commander to ‘Man of Steel’, Russell Crowe has proved to everyone, spectators and critics alike, that to be a great actor you need both a great physical presence and a great mind: sort of like Taormina, which loves the belly of the moviemaking art - comedies and horror films - and also the high-mindedness of auteur cinema.” Crowe has recently shone as Jor-El, the biological father of Superman in Man of Steel, which was earlier played by Marlon Brando in Richard Donner’s 1978 version of Superman. The fest, to be continued for eight days, began on June 15 and Henry Cavill starrer Man of Steel will also get a special screening at the fest.