Best Known As: The star of the movies Closer and Croupier
Clive Owen is a rugged and intense leading man of films who made a splash as the title character of Croupier (1998). Owen studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the late 1980s, and after an impressive start on the stage he went on to television and film. He made his big-screen debut in 1988's Vroom, but it was the gradual success of Croupier that made him an international celebrity (British audiences already knew him better as DCI Ross Tanner in the 1999 television mini-series Second Sight.) Owen has since become a major movie star whose films include low-key dramas, thrillers and costumers. His credits include Gosford Park (2001), Closer (2004, with Julia Roberts), King Arthur (2004, with Owen as the king and Keira Knightley as Guinevere), Sin City (2005, based on the comic books by Frank Miller), Inside Man (2006, directed by Spike Lee), Children of Men (2006, with Michael Caine) and Shoot 'Em Up (2007, with Paul Giamatti).
Owen appeared as The Driver in the online promotional BMW films known as The Hire in 2001 and 2002 ... Owen starred in the original stage production of the play Closer.
Born: Oct 03, 1964 in Coventry, Warwickshire, England
Occupation: Actor
Active: '90s-2000s
Major Genres: Drama, Thriller
Career Highlights: Croupier, Children of Men, Duplicity
First Major Screen Credit: Vroom (1988)
Biography
A suave, darkly handsome actor reminiscent of the young Sean Connery in looks and charisma, Clive Owen first came to international attention with his sinuous, understated portrayal of the amoral protagonist of Mike Hodges' Croupier (1998). A flop in Britain, where Owen had long been a staple of various BBC TV series, the film was a sleeper hit in the States, its success duly generating a flurry of interest in the relatively unknown actor who lent the film its seductive intensity. A product of Coventry, Warwickshire, Owen got a bumpy start in his chosen career, living on the dole for two years after he left school. Fortunately, respite arrived in the form of an acceptance to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1984, and following his graduation from RADA, the young actor joined the Young Vic Theatre Company, where he performed a number of the classics.
Owen broke into TV in 1986 with a guest appearance on the series Boon, and subsequently made his film debut in Beeban Kidron's Vroom (1988), a road movie co-starring David Thewlis and Diana Quick. More television work followed in the form of Chancer, a popular miniseries that cast Owen as its heroic protagonist. The actor also found himself increasingly busy with big-screen performances, turning in a complex portrayal of a man involved in an obsessive and incestuous relationship with his sister (Saskia Reeves) in Close My Eyes (1991). Owen received one of his biggest roles to date in Sean Mathias' 1997 screen adaptation of Martin Sherman's Bent, a Holocaust drama in which Owen starred as a bisexual concentration camp inmate who falls in love with a fellow prisoner (Lothaire Bluteau). Although the film earned a substantial degree of critical acclaim and boasted the talents of such luminaries as Ian McKellen and Mick Jagger, it failed to garner much commercial notice.
Owen finally broke through to an international audience with Hodges' Croupier, earning almost unanimous acclaim for his portrayal of a struggling writer who becomes caught up in an intricate scam after taking a job in a casino. He subsequently starred as a prisoner who takes up gardening in Greenfingers, a comedy that also starred Helen Mirren and had its premiere at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. The actor also remained active on the stage, even as his screen work thrived, starring in the original 1997 London production of Patrick Marber's highly feted Closer, and performing alongside Rachel Weisz and Paul Rhys in Sean Mathias' acclaimed revival of Noël Coward's Design for Living at London's Donmar Warehouse.
The new millennium saw Owen appearing in an eclectic range of projects. In 2001, he starred as the only recurring character in BMW's Hire series of ambitious short films by directors such as Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie and also appeared in Robert Altman's acclaimed Gosford Park. Following a memorable supporting performance opposite Matt Damon in 2002's popular The Bourne Identity, Owen moved up to a starring role as an international relief worker who has an affair with Angelina Jolie in 2003's Beyond Borders. The next year, he took on the title role in King Arthur, Antoine Fuqua's non-fantasy retelling of the legendary story, with then it-girl Keira Knightley as his Guinevere. Both Beyond Borders and King Arthur failed to garner much of an audience, with the latter especially disappointing in light of its 120-million-dollar budget. Despite buzz about the possibility of Owen taking over the James Bond role in the iconic series, his prospects as a Hollywood leading man seemed to be faltering.
His biggest success to date came in early 2006, when he played the criminal mastermind behind a savvy bank heist in director Spike Lee's first blockbuster genre picture, The Inside Man. He would follow that with Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, a futuristic thriller where Owen plays a man protecting a pregnant woman at a time when no human beings have been born in nearly two decades. Owen also took a part in Shekar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a sequel to his Oscar nominated biopic Elizabeth. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Clive Owen (born 3 October 1964) is an Englishactor and has been working for nearly two and a half decades. He won a Golden Globe, BAFTA Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for his appearance in the 2004 film, Closer.
The fourth of five brothers, Owen was born in Coventry, West Midlands, England, the son of Pamela and Jess Owen. His father, a country and western singer, left the family when Owen was three years old, and despite a brief reconciliation when Owen was nineteen, the two have remained estranged.[1] Raised by his mother and stepfather, a railway ticket clerk,[2] he has described his childhood as "rough."[1] While initially opposed to drama school, he changed his mind in 1984, after a long and fruitless period of searching for work. Owen graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1987 with a class that included Rebecca Pidgeon, Serena Harragin, Mark Womack and Liza Tarbuck. After graduation, he won a position at the Young Vic, performing in several William Shakespeare plays. In an incident he later described as "very schmaltzy", he met his future wife when the two performed the leads in Romeo and Juliet.[3]
Career
Initially, Owen carved out a career in television: in 1988 Owen starred as Gideon Sarn in a BBC production of Precious Bane and the Channel 4 film Vroom before the 1990s saw him become a regular on stage and television in the UK, notably his lead role in the ITV series Chancer, followed by an appearance in the Thames Television production of Lorna Doone.
He won critical acclaim for his performances in the 1991 Stephen Poliakoff film Close My Eyes, in which he has a full frontal nude scene, about a brother and sister who embark on an incestuous love affair; he subsequently appeared in The Magician, Class of '61, Century, Nobody's Children, An Evening with Gary Lineker, Doomsday Gun, Return of the Native, The Turnaround and then a Carlton production called Sharman, about a private detective. In 1996 he appeared in his first major Hollywood film The Rich Man's Wife alongside Halle Berry before finding international acclaim in a Channel 4 film directed by Mike Hodges called Croupier in 1998. He played the title role of a struggling writer who takes a job in a London casino as inspiration for his work, only to get caught up in a robbery scheme. In 1999 he appeared as an accident-prone driver in Split Second, his first BBC production for a decade.
He then starred in The Echo, a BBC1 drama. He starred in a film called Greenfingers about a criminal who goes to work in a garden, before appearing in the BBC1 mystery series Second Sight. In 2001 he provided the voice-over for a BBC2 documentary about popular music through the years called Walk On By, as well as starring in a highly-acclaimed theatre production called A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, about a couple with a severely handicapped daughter.
Owen appeared in the West End and Broadway hit play Closer, by Patrick Marber, which was produced as a film, and was released in 2005. He played "Dan" in the play, but was "Larry" the dermatologist in the film version. His portrayal of Larry in the film version earned him a lot of recognition as well as the Golden Globe and BAFTA award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He noted that the expectations of him since the Oscar nomination have not changed the way he approaches film-making, stating "I try, every film I do, to be as good as I can and that's all I can do."[4]
After Closer, he appeared in Derailed alongside Jennifer Aniston, the comic bookthrillerSin City as the noirantiheroDwight McCarthy and as a mysterious bank robber in Inside Man. Despite public denials, Owen had long been rumored to be a possible successor to Pierce Brosnan in the role of James Bond. A public opinion poll in the United Kingdom in October 2005 (SkyNews) found that he was the public's number one choice to star in the next installment of the series. In that same month, however, it was announced that British actor Daniel Craig would become the next James Bond. In an interview in the September 2007 issue of Details, he claimed that he was never offered or even approached concerning the role.[5] In 2006, Owen spoofed the Bond connection by making an appearance in the remake of The Pink Panther in which he plays a character named "Nigel Boswell, Agent 006" (when he introduces himself to Inspector Clouseau, he quips that Owen's character is "one short of the big time").
Owen was also the lead in 2009's The International, a film which he described as a "paranoid political thriller".[7] Owen and Denzel Washington will return for the sequel to Inside Man, which will be released in 2010.
Personal life
Owen lives in Highgate, London and Wrabness, north Essex, with his wife Sarah-Jane Fenton (they married 6 March 1995) and their two daughters, Hannah and Eve.
