Russell Crowe in and as Cinderella Man; with Renee Zellweger (left)

Just a few weeks before he was due to start filming Cinderella Man, playing boxer and folk hero James L. Braddock, Russell Crowe dislocated his left shoulder. It was, he says simply, a bad day.

?Yeah, a very bad day. After two months of training and preparation it was actually the first time I got into the ring to do some sparring, can you believe that?? he grins. He can smile about it now. At the time, back home in Sydney, with a major movie preparing to go into full production, it was no laughing matter.

It was, in fact, a re-occurrence of an old injury that Crowe, 40, first sustained back when he was filming Gladiator. ?Quite frankly, because of the injury it extended the time we had to prepare and the skill level, the body, the choreography, everything moved forward, everything was given more space and time.?

His training routine was punishing, to say the least. At its peak, he would start the day with a 3-km walk, followed by a 1-km run on the sand of Sydney?s beaches, then into a skipping and stretching warm-up followed by 15 minutes of shadow boxing, on to the speed bag, pad work and then a further session of stretching and ?stomach? work. That would be followed by another walk, this time 6 km.

The boxing training was supervised by the great Angelo Dundee, now 83, who worked in Muhammad Ali?s corner throughout his career. Dundee makes an appearance in the film as Braddock?s corner man.

Crowe first read a script for Cinderella Man some eight years ago. At that time, there was a different director interested and since then there have been several drafts of the script, until finally, the actor convinced his friend and collaborator Ron Howard to take up the project along with producer Brian Grazer and writer Akiva Goldsman ? the team of A Beautiful Mind.

Throughout its various incarnations, the essence of the story remained essentially the same ? James L. Braddock a promising heavyweight, a devoted family man, loses virtually everything because of bad financial judgments, dreadful luck, injury and terrible timing.

He?s forced to take back-breaking jobs during the Depression to feed and clothe his family. An intensely proud man, he refuses charity but does convince the boxing authorities to let him back into the ring at the bottom of a bill he would once have topped. No one, with the exception perhaps of Braddock himself, thought he stood a chance. In fact, the lean and hungry Braddock won in convincing style with a third round knockout and it was the start of one of the most remarkable comebacks in boxing.

?I always loved it,? says Crowe of the story. ?And it kept coming back to me in different guises, different drafts, and I?ve probably read it 24, 25 times and it still gives me goose bumps every time I read it.?

Where did you first meet Angelo Dundee?

In Australia. He came out in the second week of December (2003) and spent from then to the end of January with me, including Christmas Day, and he was there when my son Charlie was born, too. We?ve become very good friends. He?s a lovely man.

Is it enjoyable, boxing?

No, it?s not. I mean, there?s a gamesmanship to it that can be fun when you are working with boxers of a high skill level. And then it?s about a game of skill, it?s about speed and it?s about feint, it?s about having a good poker face and it?s about concentration. It teaches you a lot about your weaknesses too.

Do you see Cinderella Man as a boxing movie?

No. To me it?s the least important part of the story. To me this guy could have been any kind of sportsman. To me the most important thing is the family, the structure of the family, his buoyancy with his kids, his lightness with his kids and this sort of battle between two people who love each other and have completely different viewpoints on boxing.

Mae, his wife, is famous for only having attended one round out of all those hundreds of rounds that he fought.

Had you ever boxed before?

I did three rounds once when I was 18, against the South Pacific middleweight champion, in a gym at the top of Queen Street in Auckland. I thought I?d have a go and I was perfectly happy with myself for the first couple of rounds and then I hit him nice and cleanly with a one-two, just like I?d seen on the telly, and there was this little thing that happened with his eyes and I just knew I was in deep doggy do (laughs). He just tore me apart in the last round ? but in a nice polite way, though (laughs).

Have you enjoyed working with Renee Zellweger?

Immensely. I met her years ago, after she?d done Jerry Maguire, which I thought was fantastic.

She is really clever, she is really easy going and she is really relaxed with herself.