Actors -  Clive Owen

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.

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