Russell Crowe is remembering his old friend and neighbour, radio personality John Laws, after farewelling him at his funeral last week.
Speaking to Tim Blackwell from the Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel show on Nova FM, the 61-year-old remembered what it was like living one floor up from the radio legend for 23 years.
“My memories are not necessarily of John Laws the public figure or John Laws the man on the radio. They’re just my neighbour that I’d chat with in the car park, and he would always be asking after my sons,” said Crowe.
He recalled one instance of him returning home by boat and running into Laws and his wife Caroline on the way back to their shared apartment.
“John and Caroline were making their way up the wharf and they were walking slowly and I was looking at them going, ‘This is beautiful, this relationship that they have and here, still at their age, hand-in-hand, walking down the wall’.
“Then John’s walking stick got caught in a tile that was just slightly askew, and he fell then. As he fell, he brought Caroline down with him, so I jumped off the boat, I ran down the wharf, over the fence.
“As I got to them, and I moved John aside, just so he was OK and then I went to attend to Caroline, and she looked up, she goes, ‘Oh, Russell, I heard you were home. Lovely to see you’ … as she’s just lying down on the ground.”
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“That’s the thing with the two of them … their attitude towards life and the way to live,” the Oscar winner recalled.
Though they had their disagreements, Crowe and Laws got along well.
“There’s very few things that we ever agreed on in life. We had a completely different perspective on everything,” Crowe recalled.
“But that didn’t stop us from actually enjoying each other’s company, and the joy of making each other laugh.
“He was an erudite man, a man with a lot of experience, a man who was well-travelled, well-read. He had lots and lots and lots of opinions. He was a good chat, man. He was a dynamic chat.”
Crowe also paid tribute to radio titan at his state funeral, held in St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney on November 19.
“He had an eye for composition and beauty, a nose for a good story, and the heart of a lion, loyal, warm, and lived life to the full,” the actor said in his eulogy.
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“A long, long time ago, John asked me if I could speak at his funeral. I said yes. But he just kept on living, year after year after year.
“He lived so long, I thought I might have lost the gig,” he joked.
Laws died peacefully at his Woolloomooloo home on November 9, after spending two weeks in hospital last month.
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His career in radio spanned over 70 years, beginning when he hitchhiked to central Victoria in 1953 and took on a job as a general hand at a Bendigo radio station aged 18.
He retired from radio for the second and final time last year.
His wife Caroline died in 2022 after a long battle with ovarian cancer, with many close to Laws saying he never recovered from the loss.
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