Clive Owen's coiled intensity in the cult hit Croupier won him an American following that now threatens to make him the star he'd rather not be.
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When English actor Clive Owen made Croupier in 1997, it seemed as if this new movie was destined to be yet another of his oddball films that disappeared without a trace. Its release in London was extremely limited and the film was quickly pulled. No major American distributor went near it. Then Shooting Gallery, a small indie company with an innovative program designed to release orphan films for limited two-week runs in Loews theaters, decided to buy it. Croupier got superb reviews, and despite minuscule ads and a star unknown in the United States, audiences discovered it and took it to heart. The film played for more than six months, and Owen became an elite sex symbol. During a visit to Los Angeles after the movie hit, Owen sneaked into the back of a theater in Santa Monica to watch it with the paying public. "Just as you're getting to know the character, he throws you off by beating a guy, and I could feel the tension in the audience when he did that," Owen chuckles. "I like keeping people on edge."
Owen must like keeping his agent on edge, too. Though the actor had become a star in Britain years before when, at 25, he made an enormously popular TV series called "Chancer," he was dismayed by stardom. "Suddenly there were posters of my face all over the tube," he says. "When you're in a hit TV show, it attracts a lot of attention from the tabloids. I was young, and I couldn't handle it." He never pursued a high-profile film career. Over the years, he came to Hollywood to promote a couple of small British films that he made--including Close My Eyes, a story about incest, and Bent, adapted from the play about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany--but the movies were so esoteric that none of the studio honchos took him seriously. "I had a full, rich career in England," he says. "I did not want to do small parts in big, bad Hollywood films."
Croupier's unexpected success has upped the ante for Owen whether he likes it or not. This summer he'll be seen in the British film Greenfingers, in which he plays a troubled convict who takes up gardening and encourages a group of fellow prisoners to join him in a gardening competition. Owen says he wanted to do it because it was "a bit lighter and more charming" than his other films, but it is the actor's own hard edge that keeps the movie from tipping over into sentimentality. Next year, Owen will play a coldhearted assassin who pursues Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, his biggest movie so far. He's also just finished shooting Robert Altman's Gosford Park, in which he joins an all-star British ensemble that includes Emily Watson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates and Derek Jacobi. Owen's most intriguing recent gig, though, may well be his portrayal of the suave, unemotional driver featured in the series of short films--high-class commercials, really--commissioned by BMW and produced by director David Fincher's company for the Internet. The mini-films have been directed by an astonishing array of international talent, including John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, Guy Ritchie and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (of the Mexican hit Amores Perros). "Shooting those shorts was like going to bloody film school," says Owen. "All of the directors were hugely talented but completely different, so I learned a great deal."
While Owen seems to have let up somewhat on his unwillingness to seek recognition in Hollywood, he's unlikely to abandon the "dark, heavier stuff" he's habitually favored. "I remember years ago an American actor told me that acting in movies was all about being likable," he recalls. "I thought that was bollocks then, and I still think so."
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