Ten Actors Who Played Gay

6. Russell Crowe

In 2001, Australian actor-turned-Hollywood star Crowe starred in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind. A loose biopic of American mathematician John Forbes Nash, the film caused a furor in the gay community over claims that the filmmakers had whitewashed Nash's alleged bisexuality (even though Nash himself denies being bisexual). Crowe was derided for his defense of the film, saying that the filmmakers didn't want to equate homosexuality with Nash's schizophrenia, and also that there was a tiny, two-second scene which could indicate Nash's possible interest in men.

What some may have forgotten in the flying accusations of homophobia and censorship was that Crowe had already proven himself willing to play a gay role. In 1994, he starred in the Australian film The Sum of Us as Jeff Mitchell, an out gay man living with his widower father, Harry. Having a comfortable relationship, Jeff and Harry support each other through their romantic ups and downs, as Harry dates a woman he met through a computer dating service, and Jeff explores a relationship with a man named Greg (played by John Polson).

5. Al Pacino

Arguably America's most renowned living movie actor, Pacino has played queer or quasi-queer no fewer than three times. In 1976, he received an Oscar nomination for his lead role as the bisexual bank robber Sonny Wortzik in the fact-based drama Dog Day Afternoon. Married with children, Sonny also has a male lover, Leon (played by Chris Sarandon), whom he has "married" in a bigamous ceremony. Leon wants a sex-change operation, and Sonny decides that he will hold up a bank in order to pay for it.

The original script reportedly contained a scene where Sonny and Leon kiss each other goodbye on the street — a scene that Pacino refused to play. But this resulted in what many feel is the most powerful moment in the movie: Sonny and Leon say goodbye to each other over the telephone, unaware that the cops are listening in on their call. Even if the movie shirked showing physical affection, it didn't downplay the emotional attachment between the two men. While drafting his will, Sonny references "my darling wife Leon whom I love as no other man has loved another man in all eternity."

In 1980, Pacino signed on to play New York cop Steve Burns in William Friedkin's thriller Cruising. Hugely controversial in the gay community at the time, the film shows how Burns — an apparent heterosexual with a girlfriend — is sent undercover in the gay leather scene in order to track down a serial killer who has been targeting gay men. The assignment leads him to question his own sexuality as he visits the leather bars and develops a friendship with a gay man, Ted (played by Don Scardino), who is not part of the scene. Viewed by some as groundbreaking and deliberately ambiguous, and by others as an incoherent and homophobic mess, the film is due out later this year on DVD.

Finally, in the Emmy-winning, star-laden, 2003 HBO television adaptation of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Pacino played Roy Cohn, a fictional character based on a real-life figure of the McCarthy regime, a homophobic, homosexual lawyer who died of AIDS in 1986. Foul-mouthed, charismatic, bluntly frank about his homosexuality to his doctor (played by James Cromwell) while denying it to the rest of the world, Pacino's Cohn is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most memorable thing in the adaptation.

4. Robert Redford

Every gay movie viewer worth his salt wants to believe that Redford and Newman were playing gay (if covertly) in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). And if the Brokeback Mountain-style cover of the film's 2006 DVD re-release is anything to go by, Twentieth Century Fox has apparently had the same idea.

But those who want to see Redford in an acknowledged queer role will have to make do with the film Inside Daisy Clover (1965). Redford plays Wade Lewis, a handsome, young movie star whom out screenwriter Gavin Lambert initially conceived as a closeted homosexual. Redford asked that the character be rewritten as bisexual; the studio got cold feet over the controversial content; and by the end, Lewis' sexuality was basically boiled down to a couple of lines. (Christopher Plummer tells Natalie Wood after Redford has left her that "Your husband never could resist a charming boy.")

Nevertheless, Wade Lewis was notable both for being such an early queer character, and for the fact that — unlike queer Hollywood movie characters before and since — he apparently goes off to have a perfectly nice life.