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Russell Crowe reams reporter

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SYDNEY (REUTERS) — Hollywood tough guy Russell Crowe has admitted he angrily confronted a television producer at the British Academy Film Awards who cut a large chunk of his Best Actor acceptance speech. New Zealand-born Crowe, in Sydney to promote Wednesday’s local premiere of his award-winning DreamWorks SKG movie “A Beautiful Mind,” said he had few regrets about the confrontation with BAFTA producer Malcolm Gerrie.

“He’s not bruised, he’s not battered, but I’m quite sure his ears are still ringing,” Crowe told reporters at the “Beautiful Mind” premiere.

“I have very little remorse for what I said … though possibly it was a little more passionate in the cold, hard light of day than I would have liked it to have been,” The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper quoted him as saying Thursday.

Crowe’s angry exchange with Gerrie at an after-show party in a London hotel Sunday has been widely reported in British, U.S. and Australian media.

Oscar-winner Crowe was upset a large part of his acceptance speech, including his recital of a Patrick Kavanagh poem, was cut from the delayed broadcast of the BAFTA awards.

Britain’s The Sun newspaper and industry bible Daily Variety reported from London that Crowe shoved and cursed Gerrie in an outburst reminiscent of his Oscar-winning role last year as a Roman warrior in the film “Gladiator.”

Variety said Crowe pushed Gerrie up against the wall of a storage room in the Grosvenor House Hotel and yelled obscenities at him while his security men stood by.

Crowe reportedly told Gerrie, “I’ll make sure you never work in Hollywood,” in an outburst witnesses described as intimidating. Crowe, an Oscar nominee for Best Actor for his role as schizophrenic mathematician and Nobel laureate John Nash, said he was angry more than half of his acceptance speech had hit the BAFTA editing room floor.

“He kept saying to me it was all about time, and I was saying surely it’s got to be about content,” Crowe said.

“You’re actually talking about one minute of a one minute 50 [second] speech.”

Variety said the show ran late by 30 minutes and editors had to choose between Crowe’s speech and Warren Beatty’s acceptance of his British Academy of Film & Television Arts fellowship. That decision was made by BBC executives and not Gerrie, it said.

Crowe said his next film, with Australian director Peter Weir, is an adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s British naval novels.