Hunky Hugh Jackman outgrows Australia

By Sid Astbury Nov 21, 2008, 8:15 GMT

   Sydney - He can sing. He can dance. He can drive cattle. He's a mean half-man half-wolf with retractable metal claws, and in film director Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia, Hugh Jackman even looks the part bedding Nicole Kidman.

   Local fans Friday were coming to terms with the fact that their hunky all-rounder is in Australia no more.

   The 40-year-old has taken his family off to New York and is unlikely to again call Sydney home for at least the next decade.

   His new digs, spread over three floors in a flash condominium in Manhattan, were bought this month for 21 million US dollars. He moves there with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, along with Oscar, 8, and Ava, 3, children they adopted while they were living in the United States.

   Brendan O'Neill, editor of the London-based internet magazine spiked, predicted Hollywood would snap up Jackman - just as it had snared Heath Ledger.

   'Australian men are called on to play Hollywood's edgier superheroes,' he wrote. 'Jackman's fearsome Wolverine - huge, hirsute and with sideburns to die for - is a spiritual leader.'

   Rugged swords-and-sandals man Russell Crowe was Luhrmann's first pick to play the laconic Drover alongside a peachy Kidman in Australia. 'I don't do charity work for major studios,' Crowe, best-known as the Gladiator, said when spurning the purse offered.

   Jackman jumped in and received positive revues after the Sydney premiere this week.

   'There aren't many actors who have an ability to pick up a Nicole Kidman, throw her on the bed and ravish her with believability,' Luhrmann said. 'He's also excellent with a cattle whip.'

   Jackman, born in Sydney to English parents, took the Drover role to show his versatility and do a bit of national service.

   'I play a classic closed-off, fairly tough, uncomplicated, strong male figure,' he said. 'There's a masculine fantasy to that.'

   The Drover also has an appeal to women that has been lacking in earlier Jackman incarnations like the all-singing, all-dancing Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz and the gruff Wolverine in the Marvel Comics X-Men series.

   Kidman told reporters that snogging Jackman was a bonus of their time on the set. 'Obviously, we were in character, but it was good to go to work,' she joked.

   Sydney Morning Herald writer Fenella Souter was also smitten. 'His dark hair falls with a storm-tossed ruffle, his brow is broad, his mouth bewitching, and his three-day growth so professional it could have its own agent,' she wrote after an interview.

   Jackman said the film Australia was about 'adventure, frontier, optimism, possibility, some kind of slightly idyllic flashback to when life was as it should be - people were straighter, more honest, more authentic, where everything was a little more in its place.'

   It was almost as if he were already nostalgic for the country he was about to leave the moment the red carpet was rolled up and his work on Luhrmann's vaulting melodrama was done.