| After nearly ten years spent prospecting for the
mother lode as a Warner Bros. TV contract player, hunky sitcom vet
George Clooney finally hit pay dirt in 1994 with his dramatic role
as ER's dreamy pediatrician Dr. Doug Ross. Setting a previously unmatched
standard of excellence for soulful small-screen bedside manner, it
wasn't long before the major Hollywood studios were clamoring to bring
Clooney's talents to the big screen. Though Clooney started work at
age 5, on his father's talk show, The Nick Clooney Show, he returned
to acting at the relatively late age of 21, and only after his tryout
for a Cincinnati Reds center-fielder slot didn't pan out. With the
casual self-confidence of one born into a showbiz family, Clooney
moved to Los Angeles, where he landed his first professional gig in
a stereo commercial after arriving at the audition with a six-pack
of beer under his arm. "If you sit in on auditions, the best
actor never gets the job," Clooney later said. "Especially
in TV. You get the job when you walk in the door. Because in a weird
way, we're not selling acting. What we're selling is confidence."
But Clooney's confidence subsequently took a real
beating through some 15 dead-end TV pilots and a number of undemanding
series roles — including stints on the terminal sitcom E/R
(as a hospital intern), The Facts of Life (as a carpenter), Roseanne
(as Roseanne's womanizing boss), Sunset Beat (as a detective), Baby
Talk (as a construction worker), Bodies of Evidence (as a detective),
and Sisters (again as a detective) — before his gurney rolled
in. Michael Crichton's ER, the show that upgraded Clooney from "world's
richest unknown actor" to world's latest media darling, won
praise for its presentation of the emotional, mental, and physical
tolls emergency-room medicine takes on doctors and nurses. The show's
departure from the disease-of-the-week, Marcus Welby, M.D. formula
worked — ER became the most popular program on television,
and its stars rose with the tide.
In short order, Clooney became a hot commodity and
high-priced film offers rained down on him. His appearance as a
dashing robber-cum-vampire slayer in Quentin Tarantino's 1996 orgy
of violence, From Dusk Till Dawn, gave him an even higher profile
in Hollywood. Clooney has been pushing his work-endurance limits
ever since, on both the small and big screens. In late 1996, he
charmed Michelle Pfeiffer in the single-parent romantic comedy One
Fine Day and wrapped production on pal Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks
flagship action venture, The Peacemaker, in which he played a maverick
colonel on the hunt for nuclear-warhead hijackers. Clooney scored
another career coup when he was chosen to replace Val Kilmer in
the Batman franchise, donning cape and mask for the 1997 installment,
Batman & Robin. As for his big-screen outings in 1998, he scored
a double-whammy with a sexy starring turn as a thief-on-the-lam
in director Steven (sex, lies, & videotape) Soderbergh's adaptation
of the Elmore Leonard novel Out of Sight, and a small cameo in The
Thin Red Line, director Terrance Malick's ambitious adaptation of
James Jones' novel of the campaign to take Guadalcanal. He leveraged
his rising-star status by inking a three-year movie-development
deal with Warner Bros., and by taking a firm stand against exploitative
journalism, when he boycotted Entertainment Tonight (its sister
program, Hard Copy, aired an unauthorized clip of him and his then-girlfriend,
Céline Balidran) and abdicated People's "Sexiest Man
Alive" title. The magazine slapped his mug on the cover anyway.
In 1999, the soulful-eyed actor co-starred with Mark Wahlberg, Ice
Cube, and Spike Jonze in Three Kings, the tale of American soldiers
in Iraq at the end of the Gulf War who set out to steal a cache
of gold reportedly hidden somewhere near their desert base.
Though Clooney checked out of ER after his fifth
season on the series (he plans to make occasional guest appearances),
there will be no dearth of sightings of the actor in the years to
come. He has signed a development deal with CBS, and his Maysville
Productions has a full slate of projects in development. Among the
more notable are: Metal God, the story of a traveling salesman who
nurtures his creativity by singing in a Judas Priest tribute band;
the snowboarding comedy Zig Zag; the neighborhood secessionist comedy
How To Start Your Own Country; the romantic comedy A Thousand Kisses;
Heat Score, a political thriller about DEA agents who uncover a
CIA conspiracy; Move!, the true story of some prison inmates who
have an undeniable urge to groove; and His Promised Land, a Civil
War-era drama based on the autobiography of John P. Parker, a freed
slave who worked as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Clooney
will likely headline a fair number of the films in the eclectic
lineup. He returned to the small screen in early 2000 in a live
remake of the classic Cold War thriller Fail Safe that he both produced
and starred in.
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