Crowe allegedly threatened to kill "Gladiator" producer

Gladiator star Russell Crowe, who won an Oscar for his performance in that film, threatened to kill one of the producers for the film with his bear hands and almost refused to say the film's most famous line, according to a book expected to be published next month.

The book, The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte, is about the three men -- Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg -- who formed Dreamworks, the Hollywood studio that put up the money to film Gladiator.

In the book, LaPorte writes that Crowe was unhappy with the day rate pay for some of his assistants on the film and, as a result, called one of the film's three producers, Branko Lustig, a 77-year-old Jewish concentration camp survivor, at 3 a.m. and told him "You mother*****, I will kill you with my bare hands."

According to LaPorte, Lustig was so terrified by the threat he called Spielberg and told him: "Steven, I'm leaving. Russell wants to kill me. I'm leaving."

Somehow Spielberg convinced Lustig to say on and he joined fellow producers Douglas Wick and David Franzoni to accept the Oscar when Gladiator was named best picture at the 2001 Academy Awards celebration.

LaPorte also writes that Crowe twice walked off the set and threw fits because he refused to say the line near the end of the film ""And I will have my vengeance, in this world or the next." He was finally persuaded to say it and after it was shot told directly Ridley Scott: "It was shit ... but I am the greatest actor in the world and I can even make shit sound good."

LaPorte's book is scheduled to be published May 4.