By George, he´s made it
source:Sunday Times, ZA, date: Feb 14, 1999

The actor who made his name as a TV doctor with a wandering eye tells MARIANNE GRAY why he's not complacent about his new-found fame.

"Let's hope I can prove my chops in films," says George Clooney drolly. "Film is much more fun than TV. Right now I am still in love with making Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line." The actor who hit the big time with a starring role in the TV hospital series ER is disarmingly modest about his role in Malick's new war epic.

"They might have cut my lines to almost nothing so that if you blink you miss me," he says, "but I feel it is my most important film experience yet. I have always worshipped Terrence Malick's American heartlands films Badlands and Days of Heaven, and I fought to get him to let me be in this film. In it I play a cameo of a military captain called Charles Bosche, who comes in after this terrible battle and says that from now on everything will be different. He's a man who knows that war has the power to poison the soul, but he's a military man so he has to keep the troops going."

The film is an account of the United States's attempt to wrest the Pacific island of Guadalcanal from the Japanese forces in 1942. It is based on an anti-war novel by James Jones and it is Malick's first film in two decades. Shot in Australia and Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line co-stars Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack and Ben Chaplin. John Travolta also does a tiny cameo in it.

"We all wanted to work with Malick," Clooney says, referring to the cast list. "The thin red line of the title is the line between the sane and the mad. It's rather like walking the thin red line of success and failure in showbiz." It might seem that Clooney has suddenly arrived in a flurry of fame from nowhere, but his career has been on that thin red line for ages. There are a dozen or more years of "dreadful TV and straight-to-video" movies behind him and far, far worse if you check up on him.

Just because Clooney's now being touted as the new Cary Grant means nothing. "I just got lucky," he comments, laughing nervously when asked about the possibility of having to creep back to his former TV series Murder, She Wrote ("the junkyard for actors who become skeletons of themselves") when his star wanes. Or, for that matter, back to his current hit series ER. "Hey, I could end up hosting a chat show in Voysey, Idaho (the US equivalent of Platfontein) and THEN go back to Murder, She Wrote," he jokes. Clooney is cautious of success.

He first thought he was heading for stardom back in 1984 when he was 24 and landed a role playing a hospital intern in a short-lived comedy series named, ironically, E/R, co-starring Elliott Gould and Mary McDonnell. "I played the village idiot," Clooney says laughing. "There were also another seven series, eight pilots that were never picked up and some truly forgettable movies such as Return of the Killer Tomatoes and The Predator - Grizzly II. I took those roles to survive because I was trapped in sitcom hell. But from looking at my father's career, I knew that if you survived long enough, your career would eventually take off."

Clooney's childhood was one long object lesson in the ups and downs of showbusiness. His father, Nick Clooney, is a well-known Cincinnati variety show host and his mother, Nina, a former state beauty queen. His aunt is '50s crooner Rosemary Clooney, his cousin and best friend is actor Miguel Ferrer, son of José Ferrer. He and his sister grew up in broadcasting studios and by the time George was five, he could work the control booth and pipe in with the temperature when his father read the weather.

"From the age of six I told my father that I wanted to be famous," says Clooney, 37, greying and cute, with perfect tan and wonderfully goofy smile. He talks fast, looking up from under his brows and using his hands. Wearing the ubiquitous Levi's jeans, a denim shirt and studded boots, he is an extraordinarily good-looking man." First I tried my luck at professional baseball, then I switched to broadcast journalism. I left that because I didn't like being compared with my father," he says. In the early '80s Miguel invited him on location and he ended up with a bit part. Excited by filming, Clooney saved up $400 working as a tobacco cutter and headed for Hollywood, where he stayed with Aunt Rosemary and bicycled to auditions. His first acting job was doing a Japanese stereo commercial.

Then came the first ER. "I fell in love with the whole industry," Clooney explains. "And I loved the attention. I also love my private life, but I think I've got a great working life too." He lives in a blancmange pink Tudor Hollywood Hills hideaway called Casa de Clooney complete with pool, tennis and basketball courts, various cars, a moving population of pals and a half-deaf 80kg pig, Max. Clooney obtained custody of Max in 1989 when he broke up with his former girlfriend, Kelly Preston (now Mrs John Travolta).

Clooney, who is divorced, married actress Talia Balsam in 1989, and he is now with Celine Balidran, 25, a Parisian who is studying to be a lawyer. He tells me he has no plans to rush up the aisle again. "I've gotta focus on the things I'm willing to focus on," he explains. "The other things I shouldn't do half-ass. I shouldn't half-ass raise a kid. I've been working my whole life to get to this point. For now the work has to come first."

Clooney's recent films include One Fine Day with Michelle Pfeiffer, Peacemaker with Nicole Kidman and Out of Sight with Jennifer Lopez. He has also voice-overed the gay dog, Sparkie, in the animated TV series South Parks and will continue to do so as long as the series runs.

" Why did I want to do a gay dog? The guys who make South Parks are my friends. They brought a mike to my trailer while I was shooting ER and they said "just bark'. So I barked several different ways, woof, woof, woof, and I saw Noah Wyle (ER's Dr Carter) walking by with a what-the-hell's-goin'-on look on his face. I reckon that eventually my career will plummet. Performers in this industry are all like rock stars - they start at barmitzvahs, become rock star legends, then it's back to barmitzvahs. All careers do. I'm going to enjoy it while it's going well. I've got good screen hair so I must make the most of it before it falls out." I'd love to do European films, but I'd have to learn to speak another language. I grew up in Kentucky and English was a foreign language. I'm still working on that."

Fans can see Clooney in uniform again in the satire Three Kings, in which Operation Desert Storm soldiers go hunting for treasure they suspect has been looted from Kuwait. After that is Leatherheads, about the beginnings of American football. The Thin Red Line opens nationwide on Friday.