Clive Owen was born on 3
October, 1964, in Coventry. His father, a Country and Western singer,
walked out when he was three (he'd not meet him again for 16 years), and
he was raised by his mother and stepfather, the latter working in the
ticket office for British Rail. Clive was the fourth of five brothers.
The eldest was Garry, now a salesman. Then came Alan and Lee, musicians
(they'd release a single called Heartbeat), then Clive and Scott.
Attending Binley Park Comprehensive School, Clive was initially a good
student, in the top stream. Then something thoroughly unexpected
happened. Clive has often said that, for some unknown reason, he always
wanted to act. But it was only after he played the Artful Dodger in a
production of Oliver! that everyone else knew it too. Bitten badly by
the bug, he couldn't concentrate on anything else, putting all his
energy into the youth theatre he joined at 13. His schoolwork fell away
dramatically. Sitting nine O-levels, he passed only one - English.
His persistence was amazing, really. When he first announced in class
that he wanted to act, his teacher encouraged all the other kids to
laugh at him. Thankfully the steely intensity he exudes onscreen is a
real part of his character and he kept at it.
After his catastrophic exam
results, Clive was all for jacking school in. But one teacher saw his
potential and was keen for him to continue his studies at drama school.
Being a prickly little sod, Clive was having none of it. No one can
teach you how to act, he said, it's all inside you already. The teacher
fought back, arranging an audition for him at Mountview college and even
buying him a train ticket to London. Owen made the journey, and was
accepted by Mountview. Yet even this didn't work. Absolutely convinced
that drama school was useless, Clive turned Mountview down, deciding
instead to keep working with his youth theatre group and seek work.
It would be a bad two years. Another alumnus of Binley Park had been
John Bradbury, drummer of the band The Specials, and The Specials'
Number One hit Ghost Town had pretty accurately described the state of
Coventry at the time. Work was near impossible to find and, gradually
losing contact with his theatre group, Clive began to waste away.
"I was doing what half of Coventry was doing at the time," he
said later, "playing pool and waiting for the next Giro".
Come 1984, his situation was desperate, so desperate that his altered
his anti-education stance and, applying to RADA, was accepted. His
fellow pupils including Ralph Fiennes and Jane Horrocks, he did well,
graduating in 1987. He also had a stroke of luck, experience-wise. While
at RADA, his class worked on a new Howard Barker play, then being
performed at the Royal Court with Gary Oldman in the lead. When Oldman
fell ill, Clive was asked to step in - being the only other actor in the
world who knew the part.
After graduation, Owen went looking for stage work. He appeared in The
Cat And The Canary at Watford, and Twelfth Night at the Crucible in
Sheffield. Then he won a place at the Young Vic, playing in Romeo And
Juliet and Measure For Measure and, in Manchester, The Doctor's Dilemma.
He also met his wife. Onstage. In an incident so romantic it borders on
cliché, while playing Romeo he fell for his Juliet, Sarah Jane Fenton.
Though their relationship would occasionally be turbulent, with the
couple splitting up several times, it would last, the pair marrying in
1995 and eventually producing two daughters, Hannah and Eve.
It was all looking good. In 1988, Clive made his film debut, in Vroom.
Here he and David Thewlis played two northern lads who restore a classic
American car and take off on the road. Before they leave, though, Clive
picks up sexy widow Diana Quick, who adds serious spice to the trip.
Next he showed a very dark side with his portrayal of the psychotic
Gideon Sarn, alongside Janet McTeer's Prue Sarn, in the historical
costume drama Precious Bane. And then came a big TV hit when he played
John Ridd, the man who takes Lorna Doone to the altar in RD Blackmore's
classic. Polly Walker was his Lorna and Sean Bean, of course, was the
brooding Carver Doone.
Then, suddenly and quite
unexpectedly, he was a star. Chancer, where he played the natty, waggish
Stephen Crane, pulling scams on a weekly basis, was immensely popular,
throwing Clive's life into turmoil. The tabloid press were deeply
interested in this good-looking newcomer and invaded his privacy
wherever possible. He should have enjoyed it, but he didn't. Hating the
constant attention of the tabloids, he refused to co-operate with them,
gaining a reputation as a "difficult" actor. Also, as a
serious thespian, he was aware of the danger he was in. The public might
forever see him as Crane, or at least as a loveable rogue. Threatened
with typecasting, he decided to bail out.
Onscreen, this meant controversy. His next part was in Stephen
Poliakoff's Close My Eyes, where he played Richard, younger brother of
Saskia Reeves' Natalie. They're working-class, trapped in the stuffy
middle-class world of Natalie's husband, played by Alan Rickman. And
there's something else. They're closer than they should be and actually
WAY too close when they embark upon a doomed incestuous affair.
The public were shocked that
charming Stephen Crane should get up to such beastly antics. And Clive
lost an advert, too. He turns them all down, as a rule, but for once had
accepted a beer commercial. With Close My Eyes causing such a stir, it
was not to be. "They pulled out," explained Clive
"because they didn't want their Beer Man to shag his sister. How
mad's that?"
Clive would not be seen onscreen for another two years. Keen to let his
Chancer-based fame die away, he took to the stage. At the Hampstead
Playhouse, he played Leonard Charteris in George Bernard Shaw's The
Philanderer, directed by Brian Cox (later to be his co-star in The
Bourne Identity). Pushing even harder against type, he also appeared as
a bisexual in Sean Mathias's Donmar Warehouse revival of Noel Coward's
Design For Living, a show that would see the breakthrough of Rachel
Weisz. The Mathias connection would prove useful again later.
Come 1993, and Clive was back onscreen and, for the first time, working
in the US. In Class Of '61 he was Devin O'Neil, an Irish West Point
graduate sent off to fight in the Civil War. A modern drama, it
concentrated on people issues - friendships broken, tangled
relationships, etc - most notably the race question. Then came The
Magician, a British TV drama involving Scotland Yard, the IRA and a
great deal of counterfeit cash.
After this, Clive was back with Stephen Poliakoff, in Century. Set at
the end of 1899, it had Clive as a researcher in a medical centre,
working for the grand and brilliant Charles Dance. First he falls for a
girl working there, the sexually liberated Clara, played by Miranda
Richardson. And then he realises, much to his horror, that Dance is
actually practising eugenics, pre-figuring the Nazis by killing and
sterilising the poor and "undesirable".
His next project was
serious, too. In Nobody's Children, Ann-Margret played an American woman
who loses a baby and decides to find another in Romania - a Romania
wracked by the revolution against Ceaucescu. As Bratu, Clive appeared as
an appropriately intense Eastern European, alongside such Brit stalwarts
as Katrin Cartlidge and Frances Tomelty, Sting's ex-wife.
From 1994 to 1996, it was TV all the way. In escaping his Chancer
reputation, Clive took all manner of roles, the only similarity being
that each was radically different from the last. He was excellent
alongside Paul Merton, Martin Clunes and Caroline Quentin in the
football-based comedy An Evening With Gary Lineker.
Then came Doomsday Gun,
where Frank Langella played a supergun-builder who helped first the CIA,
then Saddam Hussein. Here Clive joined a heavyweight cast including Kevin
Spacey, Francesca Annis and Edward Fox. Next came a starring role in
Thomas Hardy's The Return Of The Native where, as Damon Wildeve, he's a
publican in love with Eustacia Vye (Catherine
Zeta Jones), a wild girl who wants to be "loved to
madness" and taken away from bleak and lonely Egdon Heath. To spite
her, Wildeve marries someone else and, as is the way with Hardy,
everything slowly slides towards tragedy and death.
After this period drama came something deeply contemporary in The
Turnaround. This was a pilot for a TV series that saw Clive as
"seedy but saucy" cop-turned-PI Nick Sharman, having a tough
time on complex cases in South London. The role gave Clive plenty to get
his teeth into. Sharman has lost his job and his wife due to drink and
drugs, so he's bright but flawed, confident but regretful, an
interesting character. The series itself would run in 1996.
Before that, it was back to America for The Rich Man's Wife, a winding,
Usual Suspects-type thriller. Here Halle
Berry is trapped in a terrible marriage and conducting an affair
with Clive, her husband's business partner. Meeting a stranger, she
mentions how great it would be if her hubbie were out of the way and,
horrifically, he very soon is. Clearly, it's a very messy situation.
This classy thriller was followed by a genuine oddity, when Clive lent
his image to the space age videogame Privateer 2. Here Clive, having
been frozen for a decade while a cure is found for his terrible
injuries, wakes up on a strange planet and has to go searching across
the galaxy to find out who he is and what the hell happened. The rest of
the cast is a spectacularly bizarre mish-mash. Lending weight are Christopher
Walken, John Hurt and Jurgen Prochnow. Adding sci-fi pedigree is
Mary Tamm, formerly Dr Who's assistant, Romana. Then there's David
McCallum, Brian Blessed and - well REALLY, Rigsby - Don Warrington from
Rising Damp.
Still battling to broaden
that CV, Clive now took on perhaps his most challenging role. Teaming up
once more with Sean Mathias, he took the lead in the film adaptation of
the stage hit Bent. As Max - a role originated by Ian McKellen in
London, then played by Richard
Gere on Broadway - he was a gay man in Dachau, who refuses to
confirm his homosexuality and receives a yellow (Jewish) label instead.
In the camp, though, he falls for the proudly gay Horst and gradually
learns to stand up for what he is - even if it means death. Clive, who
lost nearly three stone to play Max, was excellent in the part, at first
manipulative and grabbing, then open and strong.
The same year (1997) saw Clive back on the London stage in Closer, a
sexy, modern, bitter take on relationships that was described as
"Private Lives for the Nineties". A National Theatre
production at the New Ambassadors, it would soon move to Broadway, where
Rupert Graves would take Clive's role, as he had done when Design For
Living crossed the pond (Graves had also appeared alongside Clive in
Bent and Doomsday Gun).
Closer would not be the last
time Clive would test himself on the boards. In 2001, he'd star
alongside Victoria Hamilton in A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, about a
marriage crumbling under the strain of raising a multiplegic child.
Clive had in fact played that role before, back in 1994 at the King's
Head in Islington (the area where Clive now lives).
And now came Clive's big break - though it didn't seem that way to begin
with. In Mike Hodges' Croupier, he played a South African wannabe writer
who, thanks to his con man father, is schooled in most things shifty.
Getting a job in a casino, he's smart, cool and efficient, consequently
he catches the eye of Alex Kingston, who's planning a scam. Clive goes
along with it - but only because it might make great material for a book
- and so we enter a world of deception, paranoia and rampant
double-crossing. It was a pretty good movie, with Clive standing out as
the taciturn, constantly plotting lead. Yet there was no audience in the
UK - Croupier sank without trace.
Clive moved on. In the dark Christmas tale The Echo he was Michael
Deacon, a maverick reporter who, chasing up the story of a tramp found
dead in the garage of rich woman Joely Richardson, discovers far more
than he'd bargained for. Then there was an Australian production, Split
Second, where he was a lawyer who accidentally kills a cyclist and runs
away, only to have his whole life collapse around him.
And then came yet more TV
success. In Second Sight he was Detective Chief Inspector Ross Tanner,
investigating the savage murder of a 19-year-old kid. Trouble is, Tanner
has AZOOR, an acute problem with the eyes that's causing him to lose his
sight. He doesn't want to tell anyone till he's solved the case, but it
becomes apparent to Detective Inspector Catherine Tully, played by
Claire Skinner (his wife Thomasin in The Return Of The Native) who,
deciding to help him, becomes his eyes. The show - as pacey as ER,
clever and taut as Prime Suspect, and with a dash of The X-Files - was a
big hit, spawning three sequels straight away, with more in the
pipeline.
By now, Clive's life had changed. Croupier had enjoyed fabulous reviews
in the US. In fact, popular belief had it that, had the movie not
already been shown on Dutch TV, it would have received
Oscar-nominations. Hollywood was at last taking notice, and the parts
were coming his way. First though came Greenfingers, where he played a
prisoner with a talent for gardening. Spotted by horticultural expert
Helen Mirren, he finds himself entered in a national competition.
There'd also be a string of
five short films for BMW. In each, he played the mysterious Driver,
engaged in various exciting missions. These were not simply adverts for
the cars. The directors included John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee, one was
penned by Seven writer Andrew Kevin Walker, and co-stars included Mickey
Rourke, Stellan Skarsgard and Madonna,
who played a spoilt, arrogant pop star in Star, directed by her husband
Guy Ritchie. 2002 would see a further three episodes, seeing Clive work
with such luminaries as John Woo, Tony Scott, Gary Oldman, F. Murray
Abraham and James Brown.
Now the big hits began. In Robert Altman's country house murder mystery
Gosford Park, Clive found himself at the centre of the action, as a
butler with a secret past that might well have something to do with the
housekeeper - Helen Mirren once again. Then came The Bourne Identity
where an amnesiac Matt
Damon is on the run and trying to discover his own identity, while
everyone, including Clive as the shady Professor, is out to kill him.
Success allowed Clive to generate his own projects and, with Mike
Hodges, Croupier's director, he put together the existential gangster
flick, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, concerning an ex-enforcer drawn back
into the London underworld when his drug-dealing brother is raped and
driven to suicide by crime boss Malcolm McDowell. In its themes it was
very much like Hodges' earlier classic, Get Carter.
After this came Beyond
Borders. Here Clive played an impassioned relief worker who gets
involved with philanthropist socialite Angelina
Jolie as they continue to bump into each other across the planet, in
the midst of wars and dreadful natural disasters. Originally, the movie
was to have been directed by Oliver Stone and to have starred Kevin
Costner. According to producer Peter Guber, though, Costner was so
demanding they had to dump him, with Clive's old RADA mucker Ralph
Fiennes coming onboard.
But then Stone left, and
Fiennes too. Once in, Clive would not let it slip, making the most of
dramatic scenes like the one where he carries a starving Ethiopian child
into a London charity ball and accuses the wealthy guests of dangerous
irresponsibility. It was a good role, but a weak movie, not helped by
constant delays. Though budgeted at $35 million, it would take only $4.5
million at the US box office.
Nevertheless, Croupier and Gosford Park had raised Clive's cinematic
profile to such a degree that he was chosen by uber-producer Jerry
Bruckheimer to take the lead in Disney's historical re-imagining of the
legend of King Arthur. Here Owen would play the once and future king as
a Roman general leading a band of Sarmatian auxiliaries in occupied
Britain. Then, as Rome begins to fall and his knights reach the end of
their tours of duty, he must decide whether he will stick around and
lead the Brits against the invading Saxons.
He moved on to the infinitely more claustrophobic Closer, taking the
role he'd originated in Patrick Marber's play. As doctor Larry, he'd be
set up for humiliation with photographer Julia
Roberts by writer Jude
Law, but actually enjoy a relationship with her, before forging a
bond with Law's own girlfriend, a self-destructive stripper played by Natalie
Portman. It was harsh and testing emotional stuff, with Clive
stealing scene after scene from his world-renowned co-stars. It came as
no surprise when he won a Golden Globe and found himself
Oscar-nominated, too.
Following this, he'd join another all-star cast for Sin City, Robert
Rodriguez's adaptation of Frank Miller's legendary series of
intertwining comic strips. Here he'd play ex-news photographer Dwight,
horribly messed around by his dream-girl Maria
Bello, manipulated into murder, nearly destroyed. Saved by Rosario
Dawson and the girls of Old Town, he then becomes their violent
protector. Clive would then move on to Derailed, adapted by Collateral
scribe Stuart Beattie from James Siegel's novel.
Here he was an ad exec made
despondant by a sexless marriage and a daughter with chronic diabetes.
Missing his commuter-train one day, he takes a later one and catches the
eye of sexy Jennifer
Aniston. They hit it off and, eventually, wind up at a seedy hotel
where they're attacked by a thug, Aniston being raped and Owen badly
beaten. Even more unfortunately, the thug steals their details, realises
they're both married and attempts blackmail, leading a guilty Owen to
seek incompetent revenge.
Now considered a true
Hollywood up-and-comer, 2006 would see Owen making no fewer than four
appearances on our screens. First he'd pop up in a 2-minute comedy cameo
in Steve
Martin's The Pink Panther, dressed in a tuxedo, chasing bandits and
being sprayed with poisonous chemicals in jokey reference to the James
Bond role he'd recently lost to Daniel
Craig. Then would come Spike Lee's Inside Man where he'd play a
charismatic, cold and clinical crook who, when a bank raid goes wrong,
must be talked out of executing the hostages by cop Denzel
Washington.
Having missed out on starring alongside Julianne
Moore in Savage Grace, Owen would next join her in The Children Of
Men, based on PD James' novel and directed by Alfonso Cuaron. This would
be set in the chaotic world of 2027, where all men are impotent and the
country is run by the sinister Warden, who promotes the suicide of the
elderly, the exile of criminals and the enslaving of immigrants.
Owen would play a fusty
academic, used to an ordered existence, who's drawn into activism and
agrees to help a miraculously pregnant Moore reach a sanctuary at sea
where she may help scientists save the human race. Following this, he'd
return to Sin City territory for Shoot 'Em Up, a gun-loving bullet-fest
described as a John Woo wet dream, where Clive would deliver a woman's
baby during a gunfight and then have to protect it against a huge army
of shooters.
Having escaped unwanted flash-fame, then worked hard to earn genuine
respect through a series of challenging roles, coming into his own in
his late thirties, Clive Owen is doing all he can to take control of his
own life. And anyone who's ever spent time playing pool and waiting for
the next Giro would understand that.~ Dominic Wills
