HURTS SO GOODRussell Crowe, star of the new "Master and Commander,"doesn't do his own stunts to show off. For him, reel life is his real life.

Russell Crowe is discussing his body of work. And his body and his work.

There's his right forefinger, gashed by a sword in Gladiator. "I've got the feeling back in it now," he says, raising the digit aloft. "But it took two years to come back."

There's a rib in his back that popped when he fell from a horse while making the 1991 Australian pic Hammers Over the Anvil. It still bothers him off and on, most recently in the pitching swells of the Pacific as he prowled the deck of a frigate called the Rose, a dead-on replica of a 19th-century Royal Navy vessel that Crowe captains in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The Peter Weir-directed Napoleonic Wars nautical yarn opens on Friday.

Both Achilles tendons were messed up in Mystery, Alaska, injuries that the New Zealand native, who lives in Australia, blames on the picture's ice-skating scenes - "because I learned from scratch."

The tendons were aggravated again in Gladiator, "because I was wearing boots with no heels." And they "really went to the dogs" in Proof of Life, the 2000 thriller that briefly threw him into a romance with leading lady Meg Ryan.

"I was marching through the jungles of Ecuador with some very badly put-together army boots," he says.

And there was the movie he was supposed to do for director Jodie Foster - Flora Plum, in which Crowe was to portray a circus gymnast. Working himself into shape for the 2000 drama, Crowe was doing a maneuver called the Spanish Web and injured his glenoid labrum.

Ah, yes, the glenoid labrum.

"Here, I'll draw it," says Crowe, taking a pad and pen in his suite at the new Ritz-Carlton on Manhattan's southern tip - a room with an aptly commanding view of the New York harbor, with ships coming and going and a telescope by the window to watch them.

"You have your shoulder socket, the ball which goes into it, and you have a tendon," he says, diagramming away like an orthopedist explaining things to his dimmest med student. "If that's the bone, you have the bicep tendon, which runs up through here and. . . . "

Well, Dr. Crowe goes on. The gist is that he needed surgery, or else his biceps muscle would have slipped down his arm like a can of spinach in a Popeye cartoon. (Crowe says Foster still plans to make the movie, but not with him.)

"I'm carrying so many injuries from so many different roles," says Crowe, outfitted in Puma training gear and puffing away on cigarettes. "I remember talking it through with a girlfriend I had a number of years ago. And she was really disappointed that nothing was related to real life.

"But the thing is, movies - that is my real life."

Crowe, who turns 40 in April, says this with a grin. The 5-foot-11 thespian, nominated three years running for best-actor Academy Awards - for The Insider in 2000, Gladiator in 2001 (he won), and A Beautiful Mind in 2002 - is a serious bloke, but he can see the humor in things, too.

In Master and Commander, a stirring $135 million-plus conflation of two titles in Patrick O'Brian's beloved 20-volume series of historical novels, Crowe is Capt. "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, a hard-drinking, furiously driven man who chases a French warship around the southern seas. But between the cannon blasts off Brazil and the storms around Cape Horn, Aubrey can also crack wise. His joke about a couple of weevils, told at supper in the captain's cabin, marks a sublime moment in the history of bad puns.

There is a glorious shot in Weir's movie of Crowe 137 feet above the seas, standing proud atop the mast of the Rose, which has been retrofitted as the HMS Surprise. A helicopter-mounted camera catches the scene as the wind blows through Crowe's mane and the mainsails blow below.

Though accounts of actors doing their own stunts are common, and commonly exaggerated, that really is Crowe up there. (Insert your Crowe's nest joke here). There was no digital double. There wasn't even a safety harness holding the leading man of this Universal-Miramax-Twentieth Century Fox coproduction secure.

"He wouldn't wear one," says Weir, the soft-spoken gentleman director, in a separate interview. "I thought he knew what he was doing, and we weren't in violent seas. He didn't tell anybody else he wasn't using a safety harness - so it wasn't bravado."

Despite his confidence in Crowe's seamanship, Weir decided not to mention the stunt to the production's insurance people. "I'm sure they'd have said no," says the director with a laugh.

"But I totally understood Russell. . . . I thought, that's the spirit, that's gutsy."

Crowe felt that climbing the mast was necessary to garner the respect of cast and crew - and to be true to the character.

"The thing is, Jack Aubrey is very comfortable with doing that - he's noted as doing it many times through the course of the books - so I went up. But also, there was a certain pressure on me to keep the fantasy alive. We had X amount of real sailors on board the ship and I wanted to establish a trust between every man, not just the actors. . . . Some portion of what you're doing is perhaps inspiring to other members of the crew."

Weir and Crowe, who live in Sydney (Crowe also keeps a cattle ranch in the country), met in 2000 when the actor gave $40,000 to a Sydney theater company for a musical production of A Clockwork Orange. Weir's daughter was the show's production designer.

"We met in a bar after a performance and ended up having about a three-hour conversation, the basis of which was 'What should we do together?' " recalls Crowe.

"He was beginning to work on Master and Commander at the time, but he didn't bring it up. And he didn't bring up that he'd had me in mind for it, either."

When Weir offered Crowe the part the next year, the actor hesitated. "I wasn't really excited about the project, I have to say. Obviously, I hadn't done any due diligence, I hadn't really looked into it, or read the books. When I started looking into it I got interested. But what made me look into it in the first place was the desire to work with Peter, whom I'd admired and watched, in terms of his films, since I was a very young fellow. . . .

"I've been enthralled by Peter in the cinema many times: Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, Witness . . . In my job, I really think one of the things you have to do is pay back the people who have given you that experience. To me, that was a large part of embracing Jack Aubrey and this project - the affection and respect I had for Peter."

A manly movie (the film's few females are island natives seen beckoning at a port of call), Master and Commander rings with authenticity, from the rigid hierarchy of officers and crew (including boys) to the clothes to the swords to the surgical tools used by the ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin. The intellectually keen physician is played by British actor Paul Bettany, who also worked opposite Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, as the mentally unhinged math genius' imaginary Princeton roommate.

With his Master and Commander duties behind him, Crowe - who also dabbles in rock, with his band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts - returns to the antipodes. His wife, Australian singer Danielle Spencer, is expecting the couple's first child in January.

"A young fella," he beams. "I didn't have any preference. My thoughts on that are, 'Lord, a healthy baby, gender's your choice.' It just happens to be a boy."

And then Crowe starts preparing for Cinderella Man, the biopic of Depression-era fighter and folk hero Jim Braddock, who defeated heavyweight champ Max Baer in a 15-round slugfest in 1935. A Beautiful Mind's Ron Howard will direct the shoot, which starts in March.

Yes, Russell Crowe as pugilist. Putting his glenoid labrum and his Achilles tendons and his rib and all the creaky, bruised and fractured rest to the test.

"I could definitely spark up a number of old injuries," he says, shrugging his shoulder - yes, that shoulder - with the casual air of a serious pro.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com.