Profile: George Clooney may well be a heart-throb, but he likes nothing better than to hang out with his old friends at a barbecue or take to the road on his beloved motorbike, writes Hugh Linehan
George Clooney has never been to the Academy Awards: "They've asked me to present," he told a journalist before the announcement of this year's nominees. "But that seems like me trying to force my way into a party that I wasn't invited to. I think you go to the Oscars when you're nominated."
It's time to get out that tux then, George. Statistics nerds will tell you that Clooney's three nominations in one year - for directing the McCarthy-era drama Good Night, and Good Luck; for co-writing its screenplay; and for playing a CIA agent in the complex political thriller Syriana - are not in themselves a record. Warren Beatty and Orson Welles managed four apiece. But Clooney is the first person to be nominated for directing one film and acting in another in the same year. And, had he wished, he could have emulated Welles and Beatty by taking the producer's credit he was entitled to on Good Night, and Good Luck, thereby sharing in that film's Best Picture nomination. He preferred to give sole credit to his friend and co-writer, Grant Heslov.
"Did I work as a producer on the film? Sure," he says. "But not anywhere near the extent that Grant did. Films are generally about people trying to grab credit where they don't deserve it."
So, modest George Clooney: permanent fixture on all those world's sexiest men lists; multi-millionaire with houses in California and on Italy's Lake Como, where he entertains his glamorous friends (though he has flatly denied that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will tie the knot there next week); charity fund-raiser for tsunami victims; lobbyist at last summer's G8 summit; star of shiny Hollywood confections such as Ocean's Eleven; sponsor of edgier, independent movies through his own production company; all-round regular guy who just likes to hang out with his friends of 20 years at a Sunday barbecue or head off for a spin on his beloved motorbike. . . Good ol' George. Sexy George. Funny George. Smart George.
It all sounds far too good to be true. But it's hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about Clooney. David O Russell, his director on the Gulf War black comedy Three Kings, has said he would never work with the star again - "even if I was paid $20 million" - but reports from the set suggest the two fell out because Clooney yelled at Russell about the director's verbal abuse of lowly-paid extras.
Conservatives have derided him as another well-heeled Hollywood liberal preaching to the masses from the comfort of Beverly Hills, a charge taken up by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker in their film, Team America: World Police, in which Clooney, Tim Robbins and Sean Penn's "appeasement" tendencies are mercilessly parodied. But hang on; wasn't Clooney instrumental in getting South Park on to TV screens in the first place? And didn't he voice a South Park character (a gay dog called Sparky - Clooney was only required to bark)? Unlike the Penns and Robbinses of this world, gorgeous George doesn't seem to have had a sense of humour bypass.
ASKED LAST MONTH whether he had any plans to start a family, the 44-year-old confided: "I want to be married with six kids this year. I want six little sextuplets around." Which will come as a surprise to the string of well-known, beautiful women he has been involved with over the years, and to Nicole Kidman, who bet Clooney $10,000 (€8,300) that he would be married with children by the time he was 40. When that birthday rolled around, with the star still resolutely unwed, Kidman sent him a cheque, which Clooney returned, offering double or quits on his 50th.
In fact, though he was married for a short period in the late 1980s (to Talia Balsam, daughter of the actor Martin), his most long-term relationship by far has been with his pot-bellied pig, Max, who has shared his home for some 18 years. Also resident in his eight-bedroom mock-Tudor Hollywood Hills house are two overweight bulldogs. Max and the dogs don't get to go to Lake Como, though, according to their owner. "They have bad gas, so they are hard to travel with."
Good Night, and Good Luck, like Clooney's previous outing as a director, the underrated Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, is set in the early days of American television. It's not a particularly popular setting for US feature films but it's a world Clooney knows well. His father, Nick, was a popular TV anchorman and chat show host in Cincinnati. "I'm the son of a newsman," says Clooney. "My father used to quiz us when I was a kid. He'd come home and literally [ give us] written quizzes about the news."
Set in 1954, the film, which opens in two weeks' time, recounts the decision by Edward R Murrow, the most respected broadcaster of his day, to take a stand against Senator Joe McCarthy's Red-baiting. Clooney has made no bones about the parallels he sees between that era and the current political climate in the US.
Although he initially considered following his father into broadcast journalism, the young George got bitten by the acting bug and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for a while for his aunt, the singer Rosemary Clooney, as a driver. Slowly - very slowly - work started to come in, most of it pretty mundane; highlights of his 1980s career include Grizzly II: The Predator and Return of the Killer Tomatoes!, along with appearances on TV shows such as The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote.
Watching such material now, there's little inkling of the more mature, twinkling, Gable-esque star of later years - just a blandly handsome jock-type with a bad haircut.
But in 1994 he was cast as Dr Douglas Ross in a new medical drama series set in the emergency room of a Chicago hospital. ER became a phenomenon and Clooney was suddenly a star.
ONLY A TV star, though. He might have set millions of hearts aflutter as Dr Ross, but in the rigidly demarcated pecking order of Hollywood, the progression from small screen to big is far from straightforward. Look at the recent careers of the Friends cast, and at Clooney's near-contemporary, David Caruso, who quit NYPD Blue to make movies, but ended up going back with his tail between his legs to TV (and, admittedly, a lucrative pay cheque).
When Clooney started getting lead movie roles, the omens were not auspicious. The bland romantic comedy One Fine Day and sub-par thriller The Peacemaker, both designed as romantic double-handers with, respectively, Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman, failed to ignite the box office. His donning of the cape and big ears for Batman and Robin was, he admits, an unmitigated disaster, although hardly his fault. It looked as if he might be heading the same way as Caruso until Steven Soderbergh offered him the role of escaped convict Jack Foley in Out of Sight.
Soderbergh, once hailed as the new hope of American cinema because of his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, had been on a losing streak for several years, but his funky, witty, hip version of an Elmore Leonard novel, although not a smash hit, proved a career resuscitation for both men (unfortunately, it also fostered the illusion that Jennifer Lopez was a movie star). Since then, Soderbergh and Clooney have worked regularly together, and they set up the production company Section Eight, which is responsible for both Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck.
MANY MOVIE STARS dabble in independent film-making in an attempt to maintain some artistic credibility alongside the financial rewards of blockbuster entertainments. But few have been as successful at it as Clooney. In fact, with the exception of Ocean's Eleven, Soderbergh's high-style remake of an old Rat Pack heist movie, the actor has not had many bona fide commercial hits.
Instead, his most memorable work has come in smaller, quirkier films such as Three Kings, in which he played the ringleader of a gang of GIs intent on robbing a hoard of Iraqi bullion during the first Gulf War, and the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, as an escaped convict (again) on the run across the American South during the Depression. It's these rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold roles that he excels at.
He was far less memorable as the doomed fishing captain in the fact-based drama The Perfect Storm, or the amoral divorce lawyer in Intolerable Cruelty.
But his Oscar-nominated performance in Syriana, as a world-weary CIA agent cast adrift in the smoke-and-mirrors world of Middle Eastern politics, marks a successful shift in tone. Clooney piled on 30 extra pounds for the role, and suffered a serious spine injury, falling off a chair on to a concrete floor during a torture scene. After several bouts of surgery, he has now recovered.
Despite the laidback image, there's something quite driven about Clooney. He's aware of the ephemeral nature of fame, having talked about the bitterness his aunt Rosemary felt when her brand of pop music was swept away by rock'n'roll in the late 1950s. To his credit, he's determined to make the most of it.
"The truth is," he said recently, "you only get a certain amount of time where you can go to Warner Bros and say: 'Guys, we're going to make a film about oil corruption.' I'm in a position to do things I want to do and you're not going to be in that position for very long."Who is he? Ruggedly handsome film star and director.
The Clooney File
Why is he in the news? Has been nominated in three separate Academy Award categories this week.
Most appealing characteristics: Looks, charm, talent, wealth
Least appealing characteristic: He ruins it for the rest of the male population.
Most likely to say: Let's grab a beer and talk about 1970s movies, then we'll go back to my place and meet my pig.
Least likely to say: Would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?