Charities

United Nations

A committed human rights advocate, the United States actor George Clooney was designated as a United Nations Messenger of Peace in January 2008. Using his global appeal and wide ranging talents as an actor, producer, screen writer and director, Mr. Clooney has focused public attention on crucial international political and social issues while diligently working to mobilize political action against the violence in Darfur.

LINKS: George’s UN Page , www.un.org

NOOW

Our mission is to focus global attention and resources towards putting an end to mass atrocities around the world. Drawing on the powerful voices of artists, activists and cultural leaders, Not On Our Watch generates lifesaving humanitarian assistance and protection for the vulnerable, marginalized and displaced. Where governments remain complacent, Not On Our Watch is committed to stopping mass atrocities and giving a voice to their victims.

LINK: http://www.notonourwatchproject.org/

Save Darfur

Around the country and across the globe, the Save Darfur Coalition is inspiring action, raising awareness and speaking truth to power on behalf of the people of Darfur. Working with world leaders, we are demanding an end to the genocide, and our efforts are getting results.

The key to our success is the millions of everyday citizens who have joined our movement. With you and other committed activists by our side, we will end the genocide.

LINK: http://www.savedarfur.org/

International Rescue Committee (IRC)

We are the International Rescue Committee – a critical global network of first responders, humanitarian relief workers, healthcare providers, educators, community leaders, activists, and volunteers. Working together, we provide access to safety, sanctuary, and sustainable change for millions of people whose lives have been shattered by violence and oppression.

LINk: http://www.theirc.org/

United Way

United Way of America is the national organization dedicated to leading the United Way movement. Local United Ways create long-lasting community change by addressing the underlying causes of the most significant local issues. Common focus areas include helping children and youth achieve their potential, promoting financial stability and independence, and improving people’s health. Our goal is to create long-lasting changes by addressing the underlying causes of problems.

LINK: http://www.liveunited.org/index.cfm

Amnesty International

Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all. Our supporters are outraged by human rights abuses but inspired by hope for a better world - so we work to improve human rights through campaigning and international solidarity. We have more than 2.2 million members and subscribers in more than 150 countries and regions and we coordinate this support to act for justice on a wide range of issues.

LINK: http://www.amnesty.org/

ONE Campaign

ONE is Americans of all beliefs and every walk of life - united as ONE - to help make poverty history. We are a campaign of over 2.4 million people and growing from all 50 states and over 100 of America’s most well-known and respected non-profit, advocacy and humanitarian organizations. As ONE, we are raising public awareness about the issues of global poverty, hunger, disease and efforts to fight such problems in the world’s poorest countries. As ONE, we are asking our leaders to do more to fight the emergency of global AIDS and extreme poverty. ONE believes that allocating more of the U.S. budget toward providing basic needs like health, education, clean water and food would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the world’s poorest countries.

LINK: http://www.one.org/

Belstaff Is Watching

NOOW and Belstaff are teaming up to raise awareness for the Crisis in Darfur. Manuele Malenotti, owner and creator of Belstaff Fashions has been vacationing with George over the last few weeks in France and Italy.

BELSTAFF is wearing its heart on its sleeve again, announcing a new collaboration with Audi to raise awareness of the crisis in Darfur. Teaming up with charity Not On Our Watch, the two luxury brands will produce a NOOW branded Q7 to raise funds and support lifesaving projects in the troubled Sudanese region.

Earlier this year, Belstaff showed its commitment to international charitable causes by releasing a range of Free Tibet jackets - a cause that has been close to the brand’s heart since meeting the Dalai Lama in 2004.

The ongoing partnership between Belstaff and Not On Our Watch, the charity founded by Oceans Eleven stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, began last year and continues to raise awareness of global humanitarian crises.

Clooney and Pitt will host a fund raising dinner in Venice on August 26, during the city’s Film Festival, with guests from the worlds of entertainment, politics and culture expected to attend and show their support.

Source: LINK

George to visit Darfur in September

According to the July 17th issue of the French magazine “Le Point”. George will be traveling to Darfur in September with France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. Thanks to Reve for the scans.

Gallery Link: 2008-07-17 Le Point

Clooney calls for China, G8 action on Darfur | Asahi Shimbun Article by George Clooney

Clooney calls for China, G8 action on Darfur

TOKYO, Japan — Actor George Clooney called Saturday for China and other major countries to raise the pressure on Sudan to end the bloodshed in Darfur. Writing in a special Africa edition of Japan’s Asahi Shimbun guest-edited by rock stars Bono and Bob Geldof, Clooney said the international community has failed to show resolve on Darfur.China is Sudan’s largest energy partner and last year helped persuade Sudan’s President Omar al-Beshir to accept a joint United Nations-Africa Union peacekeeping force in Darfur. “But almost a year later he is still putting obstacles in the way of their full deployment. China and the rest of us need to turn up the heat,” Clooney, a prominent activist on Darfur, wrote. He also called for action by Japan when it hosts the July 7-9 summit of the Group of Eight top industrial powers. Japan held talks with Beshir when he visited for a major Africa development summit that closed Friday in Yokohama. “You are in a unique position to hold Khartoum — and ourselves — to account,” Clooney said of Japan. “Someday these atrocities will end,” Clooney said. “And when it does questions will be asked.” “Questions like: Where was the rest of the world?” he said. “Where were we when it mattered?” “Then only history will be left to judge us.”Ethnic minority rebels in the parched western region rose up in early 2003 against Sudan’s Arab and Muslim-dominated government, sparking a response which the United States has described as an act of genocide. More than 2.2 million people have fled their homes and up to 300,000 people may have died from war, famine, and disease, according to the United Nations. Sudan puts the number of deaths from fighting at 10,000.

Agence France-Presse
First Posted 17:25:00 05/31/2008
Source: LINK

Article by George Clooney in the Asahi Shimbun edition:

George Clooney
Actor,film director
05/31/08

In the past four weeks, acts of God―earthquakes, cyclones, floods―have killed many thousands in China and Burma.

In the past four years, acts of man―murders, rapes, other atrocities―have killed more than 200,000 people in the Darfur region of Sudan, and displaced 2.5 million more from their homes.

The first of these tragedies―natural disasters―we cannot prevent. The second―the unnatural, intentional tragedy that is unfolding in Darfur―we can prevent.

So why have we not?

It is not that we don’t know what is happening in Darfur. We do.

It is not that we don’t care. Around the world, people of many faiths and nationalities have been holding rallies, concerts and community meetings that show just how much they care. They’ve been donating millions of dollars, writing books, making films, sending medical supplies.

And it is not that we don’t know what it will take to end the violence. We know it will take a combination of economic, diplomatic, moral and military pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the Arab militias from killing black Africans. Heads of state have promised action. Laws have been passed to punish companies who profit from these atrocities. Negotiations have been conducted; agreements have been reached.

So there has been no shortage of information, concern, or talk about Darfur.

What is lacking is resolve.

We are trying to do this halfway.

We are allocating money―and failing to spend it. We are sending peacekeeping troops from the United Nations and African Union―and failing to give them the basic tools, the armored personnel carriers and the helicopters, to protect the population or themselves. I’ve heard that some peacekeepers even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets into the blue helmets of the UN.

We are making promises and not keeping them, raising hopes and not fulfilling them.

Our inaction is a form of complicity.

And yet: hope is not so easily extinguished. The human capacity to hope―even in the face of unspeakable horror―is an amazing thing. I have seen it. When I went to Darfur earlier this year, there was a new energy in the air as the UN―AU peacekeepers started to arrive. The people there felt for the first time that the rest of the world was finally hearing them, was finally stepping in to help them.

This is a start. But the pressure on Khartoum must continue.

China is a big player in Sudan―it is the country’s largest energy partner. Last summer China used its influence to get Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir to accept a strong UN―AU peacekeeping force. But almost a year later he is still putting obstacles in the way of their full deployment. China and the rest of us need to turn up the heat. The UN, the US, Arab countries―all have a role to play.

And that includes Japan. With Japan at the helm of the G8 this year, and as host to the world’s most powerful leaders in July, you are in a unique position to hold Khartoum―and ourselves―to account.

Someday these atrocities will end. Whether we act or not, whether we succeed or not, someday it will end. And when it does questions will be asked of us. And rightly so.

Questions like: Where was the rest of the world? Where was my country―the United States? Where was your country―Japan? Where were we when it mattered?

We cannot expect our halfway measures will make this crisis disappear. If we refuse to make a full commitment to peace, it is the Darfurians that will disappear. An entire generation of people will be gone.

Then, only history will be left to judge us.

Source: LINK

Clooney And Co. Drop $500,000 For Cyclone Relief

Not On Our Watch — the humanitarian org dedicated to putting an end to mass atrocities around the world — has donated $500,000 to relief aid in the cyclone-devastated country of Myanmar. The foundation was started by George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Jerry Weintraub, and David Pressman in response to the worsening Darfur crisis — but has quickly spread to address the problems occurring in Burma (Myanmar) as well.

The group will give $250,000 to Save the Children for relief efforts to suffering children and families effected by the storm. They will then collectively match the money given by the foundation for an additional $250,000. According to ETOnline, Save the Children is one of the only humanitarian organizations actually deployed in the country and has already helped more than 100,000 people, including about 40,000 young children.

Since last year, Not On Our Watch has granted over $6 million dollars towards the crisis in Darfur. If you would like to help out their efforts to help those suffering on account of these atrocities, please click here for more.

Source: Link

Captain Clooney calls the shots

An AK-47 assault rifle hovers just centimetres from George Clooney’s head. The finger nervously twitching on the trigger-guard belongs to a teenage boy. One false move and it will be curtains for Clooney.

This isn’t a moment from the movies. This horrifying incident actually occurred earlier this year, when the 46-year-old actor-director was travelling through southern Sudan in his capacity as a UN messenger of peace and was stopped at an isolated checkpoint.

“When you go through these checkpoints, there are kids with AK-47s in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “They’re just young children, and they go through the car and take what they want.

“We hid all the tapes and stuff, but they held guns on us and stole what they could. It happens all the time. The problem wasn’t that they were out to get us from a political standpoint. It’s the fact that they’re 14-year-old kids with guns. It’s dangerous. Life is cheap there; I guess we took a bit of a risk.”

Clooney is no stranger to risk. When it comes to his career, his willingness to take a gamble has paid huge dividends.

Consider his two most recent projects, Michael Clayton and the coming Leatherheads, his third directorial outing.

The former saw him nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar, with co-star Tilda Swinton winning the Academy Award for best supporting actress, and yet the film would not have been made unless Clooney had been willing to take a punt. The script had languished in development for eight years and was to be directed by first-timer Tony Gilroy.

Similarly, with Leatherheads, a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of American football in the 1920s in which Clooney plays the male lead, he again showed courage.

The story had interested him for more than a decade and while several distinguished screenwriters — including Out of Sight’s Scott Frank, Quiz Show’s Paul Attanasio and True Crime’s Stephen Schiff — had failed to revise the original screenplay, written by two Sports Illustrated journalists back in 1992, Clooney took it on.

“Playing Dodge Connelly in this movie was something that had interested me for a while,” he says, “but playing a professional football player was something that I’d soon be too old to contemplate.”

The risk he took was accentuated by the fact that he’d suffered a serious injury while shooting Syriana, the 2005 CIA thriller that won him an Oscar for best supporting actor.

Strapped in a chair for the film’s gruesome torture scene, Clooney fell backwards and cracked his head on a cement step. He has suffered headaches ever since and, according to some, short-term memory loss.

“What was the question again?” he chuckles. “I’ve forgotten! Seriously, though, on Leatherheads I was getting smacked around the football field by a bunch of guys much younger than me. I lost a lot of weight and all the tabloids were like, ‘Cancer scare!’”

Despite its sporting backdrop, the film owes much to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s, and all the best passes are those hurled between Clooney and his co-star, Renee Zellweger. It is a perfect vehicle for actors with movie-star quality, something that Clooney possesses in abundance.

“Films like Michael Clayton and Leatherheads, they just don’t make them any more,” he says. “With Leatherheads, I wanted to capture the feel and techniques used in films by Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks and George Stevens.

“There’s a style to what these guys did. If you watch The Thin Man or Bringing Up Baby, Philadelphia Story or His Girl Friday, they still work today. They’re classic comedy and those characters are smarter than
we are, and they’re certainly funnier.

“It’s a simpler style of storytelling. You don’t have to do poop jokes; the comedy builds more slowly. Nowadays we don’t have that patience any more in film. We want it all now. And while I knew I wouldn’t do it as well as Hawks or Capra, I at least know the ground they’re working on.” He flashes a smile. “So I simply tried to steal their ideas!”

This is not false humility; in person, Clooney is every bit as charming as even his most enchanting on-screen characters. Dressed simply in a black shirt and blue jeans, he cracks jokes and never stumbles into arrogance.

“How do I feel about being a ‘fantasy man’ for women? If people see me up close, they’d soon change their minds,” he says. “Anyway, people’s fantasy guys change every 15 minutes, so you just take those things as compliments, knowing that it’ll all change fairly quickly.”

Clooney says he regularly hears rumours that he is about to get married, the most recent “announcement” claiming that he was to marry his current girlfriend, Sarah Larson. “My BlackBerry woke me up the other day. It was buzzing away and when I looked at the message, it said that I was getting married. I thought, ‘Wow, someone should tell Sarah!’”

After a string of failed romances, Clooney seems happy in his current relationship. In recent years he has dated Charlize Theron, Kimberly Russell, Lisa Snowdon, Krista Allen and French model Celine Balitran.

He was married to actress Talia Balsam between 1989 and 1993 and after the separation swore he’d never marry again. Whether he sticks to his pledge remains to be seen, although he currently has more than enough obligations to devour his time.

As well as starring in and directing Leatherheads, the first film from his newly formed Smokehouse production company, he recently shot his third project with the Coen brothers, Burn After Reading, completing what the Coens describe as his “trilogy of idiots”, following O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty. However, contrary to tabloid speculation, he is not returning to the TV show ER.

“I care about my legacy,” he says. “There are two worlds here. You get a film that opens huge on the first weekend, and of course that’s nice, but often the films that open big are not the ones that are remembered as part of your legacy.

“So the trick is to balance a couple of those, thereby allowing you to do the smaller film, the ones that will last.

“Leatherheads is a larger film but it wasn’t designed as a blockbuster. Of everything I’ve done, I’m most proud of Good Night, and Good Luck because I wrote and directed it, and also I think that will last a while.

“I am also going to direct again at the end of the year. It’s called Farragut North, about the people who run political campaigns. But I wouldn’t do a lead part. I’ve been in every film that I’ve directed (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck, and now Leatherheads), and that’s fine. But when you’re the lead, it’s hard to get the rhythms going.

“Hey, I’m getting older,” he smiles, before offering what is surely just a quip: “Maybe I’m becoming less willing to take a risk.”

Source: Link

George Clooney depends on ‘Cuz’

NEW YORK — WHEN IT comes to human rights, George Clooney is one of Hollywood’s most active major stars. But what can any celebrity activist be without a consigliere? The man Clooney relies on for advice on the issues he cares most about is David Pressman, an accomplished New York civil rights attorney and former staff member in President Clinton’s State Department.

Some might argue that Pressman has one of Hollywood’s most desirable jobs, a trusted member of an A-lister’s inner circle. But what Clooney values most about the understated, unassuming Pressman, though, is that he doesn’t have a trace of Hollywood about him — other than he’s Central Casting’s idea of a human rights activist. (Only 30, he graduated from law school with honors, worked for the ACLU and clerked for the Supreme Court — of Rwanda. He and his law partner Ron Kuby recently persuaded a Bronx judge to overturn the conviction of a man who spent 10 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. In his spare time, he’s learning about directing operas at Lincoln Center.)

“He’s as smart politically as anyone I know, and he’s brave,” Clooney said this week. “I talk to him at least three times a week; I depend on him to keep me informed.”

In early 2006, Clooney and his newscaster dad, Nick Clooney, resolved to go to Sudan to see the situation in war-torn Darfur themselves. They were having trouble finding somebody with the right connections and courage to guide them through a combat zone while lugging the camera with which they planned to make a documentary. And it wasn’t what normally passes for shooting on location because, in that part of sub-Saharan Africa, even Clooney’s name carries less weight than an empty Kalashnikov magazine.

Then the elder Clooney met one of Pressman’s relatives at a party and learned of the extensive connections the young lawyer had made in the region through his work as a special assistant to then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and, later, as a Sudan expert for the United Nations. The elder Clooney called Pressman the next day. Both Clooneys quickly came to view Pressman as a member of the family. “I call him ‘Cuz,’ ” Clooney said. “My dad seems to think we’re related. I’m not sure how he came up with that.”

The idea makes Pressman chuckle. “He’s an Irishman, and I’m a Jew. Go figure.”

Over lunch recently at a fashionable bistro near his Chelsea law office, Pressman recalls that a female friend reacted in horror when he told her that he was taking George Clooney into Darfur. “She said, ‘You realize if anything happens to him, you will be committing the greatest crime against womankind,’ ” Pressman said.

Since the first trip in 2006, Pressman and Clooney have gone on a number of missions to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa to lobby for peace in Darfur.

The Clooney-Pressman collaboration is emblematic of a new era in celebrity activism among those who want to do more than casually lend their names to passing causes. Top political advisors are in demand, and there are few now at work in this area: Trevor Nelson, a former Clinton White House staffer, serves as advisor to Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Shakira. Another Clinton veteran, John Prendergast,works closely on African issues with Mia Farrow and Don Cheadle. (He also has the distinction of being the one who took Jolie on her first trip to Africa.)

When it comes to the law and human rights, Pressman has a gold-plated résumé.

The son of a liberal judge and another attorney, Pressmen grew up in California believing that the law was a tool of equal rights and equal justice and not just a career.

After law school at New York University and work overseas, he joined the late William Kunstler’s law firm. He loved the idea of taking on cases most firms wouldn’t touch, like the Indian activist Leonard Peltier’s ongoing pardon request.

Then came Clooney, and Pressman still seems a little dazed over his new comrade, who has affected his life in unexpected ways. Over lunch, a writer complimented the civil rights attorney on his elegant blue suit. “This is the best suit I own,” he said proudly. “It’s by a European designer whose name I can’t pronounce.”

Naturally Clooney was involved: When the pair went to Beijing to lobby and Pressman’s luggage was lost, he had nothing to wear to their meetings. Within a few hours, Clooney turned up with the suit.

“George Clooney makes an excellent stylist,” Pressman quipped.

When they first landed in Sudan in 2006, a teenage militia member greeted them by sticking the muzzle of a rifle in Clooney’s face because the star was trying to film the arrival. Clooney recalls that Pressman nonchalantly walked over, pushed the muzzle of the gun aside, calmed the boy down with a few lighthearted words and went on as if nothing had happened.

The duo have a busy summer planned, one that involves an increasing number of Clooney’s Hollywood colleagues. Pitt, Cheadle and Matt Damon have all joined the group Clooney and Pressman co-founded, Not on Our Watch.

At the moment, they’re pursuing a two-pronged strategy, with Clooney lobbying Western leaders such as British Prime Minster Gordon Brown for helicopters that can be used to distribute food and other humanitarian aid to refugees in Darfur. At the same time, he is serving as a U.N. messenger of peace, traveling around the world to raise awareness about the situation in Darfur and other trouble spots. And, quietly, the actor has met with Sudanese rebel leaders urging them back to the conference table.

For Pressman, there’s a personal drive here. His Jewish family’s roots are in Eastern Europe, and he understands all too well what it means when the world looks away from mass murder.

“We keep saying ‘never again,’ ” Pressman said. “And yet it’s again, and again, and again.”

Darfur Olympic boycott, Celebrity Causes, Secrets of the Stars, Lisa Snowdon on George and more from the Harper’s Bazaar

Olympic boycott over Darfur would be ‘excessive’: George Clooney

MADRID (AFP) — Boycotting the Beijing Olympic Games to try to pressure China into taking action to stop the violence in Sudan’s war-torn region of Darfur would be “excessive”, said US actor George Clooney in an interview published Saturday in Spain.

“It seems excessive to boycott the Games because China does business in Darfur. It’s always more important to keep a line of communication open,” the Oscar-winning thespian told the El Pais newspaper.

Clooney, 46, has become a leading advocate for action to end the conflict in Darfur and for more humanitarian aid for the millions caught up in the conflict, after filming a documentary on the ongoing violence there last year.

He set up Not on Our Watch, a humanitarian group that focuses global attention on Darfur and has raised over nine million dollars (five million euros) for the region, with his “Ocean’s Thirteen” castmates Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Don Cheadle.

Some Western activists have proposed shunning the Beijing Olympic Games in August in a bid to pressure China, the top arms supplier to Sudan and a major investor, particularly in its oil industry.

The Darfur conflict, which the United Nations says has claimed the lives of about 200,000 people and displaced 2.2 million, has raged since 2003 when rebel groups demanded a greater share of the country’s resources.

Arab militias aligned to the government in Khartoum have been accused of horrendous violence against civilians as well as soldiers in quelling the rebellion.

Clooney, who won the Oscar as best supporting actor in 2006 for his role as a CIA agent in the political thriller “Syriana”, was named an official UN peace envoy in January.

The star, who owns a villa on Italy’s Lake Como, also said in the El Pais interview that he though Europe was more ecologically friendly than the United States.

“What is certain is that there is less consumption (in Europe) than in the United States and people recycle more. Things work in a much more intelligent way,” he said.

The actor, who suffered a broken rib in a motorcyle accident in the United States last year, said he tries to do his part to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions when in Italy by always travelling by motorcyle.

Source

Half say celebrities don’t aid causes they promote: poll

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fifty-one percent of Americans say celebrities make little or no positive difference to the issues they promote while 45 percent say they have a large or some positive influence, according to a new survey.

Oprah Winfrey was seen as the best champion of causes with 49 percent of those surveyed in the Harris Poll saying she was very effective at raising awareness. The others in the top five were Bono (32 percent), Angelina Jolie (31 percent), Brad Pitt (23 percent) and George Clooney (22 percent).

Harris surveyed 2,513 U.S. adults online between March 11 and 18.

Younger people were more likely than older people to believe celebrities make a positive difference, and Democrats (55 percent) more likely than Republicans (36 percent) to feel the same, Harris said in a statement.

Fifteen percent of those surveyed said they have supported a cause because of what they heard an actor, singer or other celebrity say or do.
Forty-seven percent said it was bad for celebrities to endorse political candidates.

Secrets of the stars
21 April 2008
The Courier-Mail

What GEORGE CLOONEY can’t live without

The guys: “There are seven men. We’ve all been together for many, many years. We’re really close and really supportive of one another.”
Loyalty: “Probably the one thing I’m most proud of in my life is how hard I’ve worked at keeping everybody around. It can get tricky because when you start to get famous, people surround you and tell you how great you are.”
Immediacy: “Anyone who knows me knows I actually live for the moment. I have to make every day count.”
Making work fun: “I started out in television and I was in shows that didn’t allow so much fun or I wasn’t in a position where I could do that. I made a decision to have a really good time doing my work. You know, it isn’t brain surgery.”
Coffee: “I live on the stuff.”
Basketball: “That’s my exercise.”
Prenuptial agreements: “They’re very important. I have one with anyone that I go to dinner with.”
Good manners: “Being polite is important. I hold doors open for people. Not just girls, but people. And when filming of Oceans 12 disturbed my neighbours in Laglio (in northern Italy), I wrote a letter of apology to them.”
Drinking: “Drinking is imperative. If you lived my life, you’d drink, too.”

A few words from Clooney’s ex Lisa Snowdon
Pulled from the Recent Daily Mail Interview “Lisa Snowdon’s life through a lens”.

People always ask me what George Clooney was like in bed. It’s usually after a few drinks have made them brave. I never tell. We finished three years ago, but I still get asked about it a lot. The media attention when we were together was unbelievable. I’m not sure how I survived it. The hardest thing to deal with was the perception that I was going out with George to further my career. In fact, it did me no favours at all. Work almost totally dried up. People saw me living a new life and thought I wouldn’t be interested in modelling again. And TV people didn’t know where to place me. They’d see me in Hollywood with George and think, “She’s not going to be interested in doing a show for the BBC.”

I miss George’s castrated pot-bellied pig. Max was really the cutest pet and I got along with him famously. That surprised a few people, because he wasn’t keen on women, as it was a woman who castrated him. But I never had any problems with him. When I was staying at George’s house in LA, I’d always know it was time to wake up because Max would start squealing, asking to be let in. So I’d go downstairs and give him some fruit for breakfast. Often he’d happily wander around the house. I’d come out of the bathroom and meet him on the landing. A pot-bellied pig might not sound like an ideal pet, but once you get to know them it’s just like having a dog around.

Personally speaking George reached out and squeezed me by the arm …
By Justine Picardie
20 April 2008
The Sunday Telegraph

When the invitation arrived to have dinner with George last week, I was delighted. You see, me and George, we go a long way back. We’re the same age - 46 - but I only got to know him in the mid-1990s, when I saw him every week. And though I’m happily married to another man, there have been times in the past, I confess, when I’ve spent Saturday nights on the sofa ogling George.

As it turned out, dinner wasn’t quite as intimate as I’d hoped: it was with 65 others, in a Covent Garden restaurant. George was sitting with his friend Mariella Frostrup, who was hosting the evening with Lucy Yeomans, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, to celebrate the premiere of his latest film, Leatherheads; I was some distance away, on another table, with a good view of the back of his head.

Of course, my relationship with George Clooney has been entirely one-sided since the start. But the thing is, when you’ve admired someone from afar for so many years - and I’ve been a fan of Gorgeous George since he was cast as lovable Dr Ross in ER in 1994 - it’s difficult not to feel involved in his life. Hence my knowledge of his pot-bellied pig Max, a 300lb playmate who died in 2006, and how George and Max shared a home, and sometimes a bed.

I also know about the ups and downs of his romantic life: the break-up of his marriage to Talia Balsam in 1993; the subsequent involvements with a dizzying array of women (including Renée Zellweger, his co-star in Leatherheads), and the fact that his current girlfriend, Sarah Larson, is a 29-year-old former Las Vegas cocktail waitress.

Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea here, I’m not a stalker; nor am I the only woman who feels weirdly attached to George Clooney. For example, when I happened to tell my dentist about the supper invitation, she was so excited that she promptly gave me a teeth-whitening kit. ‘You can’t meet George with tea stains on your molars,’ she said.

Similarly, a friend of mine who was also at the Harper’s dinner confessed to me, sotto voce, that she had spent the previous 48 hours in preparation. ‘I’ve waxed and exfoliated every nook of my body,’ she said, and indeed, she was positively glowing, with a look on her face that I hadn’t seen since her wedding day.

But as the evening wore on, without any closer contact with George, she and I began to feel a little deflated, even bitter. Thus it was that I found myself brooding over how he hadn’t come through for my sister, and if that sounds irrational, then let me explain.

Ruth was an even more devoted fan of ER - in fact, she was the person who introduced me to it in the first place - and like me, she was a journalist, hoping for a Clooney interview at some point in her career. As it happens, she was on the verge of getting one, 10 years ago, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. This did not get in the way of Ruth’s determination to go through with the interview - ‘the Clooney-luvin’ Pollyanna inside you just won’t give in’ she observed of herself at the time - but for one reason or another, George couldn’t make it on the day.

When Ruth complained about the no-show, a top-secret boxed set of preview videos arrived, for the forthcoming season of ER. (Not, I hasten to add, from George Himself, but a sympathetic press officer at Channel 4.) Which meant that I spent many hours alongside my sister in the last weeks of her life, watching ER, in order to discover whether or not Dr Ross and Nurse Hathaway would live happily ever after. (They did.)

Anyway, as the dinner was drawing to a close last week, another friend of mine - an actress - decided to take direct action, and led me across the room to where George was standing, getting ready to leave. She introduced me, he shook my hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m George.’

‘I know,’ I said, gracelessly, but I couldn’t think straight at the time: I was too rattled by the fact that a) he is smaller in the flesh than he is on screen, with a tan the colour of dark leather, and b) he is nevertheless astonishingly handsome. Fortunately, he took control of the situation, by displaying a technique that he recently described to the New Yorker. When faced with ‘the friend of a friend who has become a little dizzy in his presence’, Clooney understands that ‘your job is to find the best way for those people to hold on to their dignity … they have to be shown a path back to their normal selves’.

What was the path he showed me? He said, ‘I’m thinking of taking out a newspaper ad to say that my film is number one in the Ukraine.’ He flashed that white-toothed smile of his, but instead of looking smug - an accusation levelled by some critics - he seemed charmingly

self-deprecating, in his oblique reference to the fact that Leatherheads had had an inauspicious opening weekend at the box office.

I stammered out a reply, saying that I was sure the film was great, and I looked forward to seeing it, and he did that thing successful politicians do. He looked me in the eye, for the duration of our brief encounter, and then reached out, squeezed my arm, and kind of patted me on the back of my neck. ‘Good to meet you,’ he said. ‘You take care …’

Afterwards, a Hollywood scriptwriter who’d witnessed this exchange remarked, ‘George has perfect timing on when to squeeze and pat.’

But me, I’m not cynical; though in the unlikely event another offer comes through to meet Clooney, maybe I’ll be the one who doesn’t show up. That way, he’ll stay sprinkled with fairy-dust whenever I see him shimmering across the silver screen.

George visits with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and The New Yorker: Somebody has to be in control.

Clooney in Downing Street visit
Hollywood actor and director George Clooney has visited Downing Street to discuss the Darfur crisis with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.  The star, who is a UN “messenger of peace”, said a “wonderful suggestion” for buying peacekeeping helicopters had been made at the meeting. Mr Brown said the situation in Darfur, part of Sudan, was “unacceptable” and praised Mr Clooney’s “leadership”.   The 46-year-old star is in London for the premiere of his film Leatherheads. During his visit Mr Clooney, an Oscar-winner, posed for pictures with Mr Brown and his wife Sarah Brown. Speaking later to reporters at London’s Dorchester Hotel, he said a “wonderful suggestion” had been made at the meeting about a fund which could involve leasing or buying helicopters “to create some security”.  Mr Clooney added that it had been mooted London could be a place where Sudanese rebel leaders hold peace talks. Mr Brown said: “In February and March alone, fighting displaced 58,000 people.   “Humanitarian access is limited and Unamid (United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur) deployment is still too slow. “The rebels and government continue to openly flout United Nations Security Council resolutions through attacks on civilians.  “I am grateful for the leadership George Clooney has shown in drawing attention to this crisis - this is a humanitarian tragedy of colossal proportions and the world must take note and act.   “The UK is working with the international community and others to pressure all sides to agree a ceasefire, start peace talks, and facilitate the rapid deployment of Unamid.”  Clooney took up his UN role in January.  (Source)

The New Yorker
Somebody Has to Be in Control
The effort behind George Clooney’s effortless charm.
by Ian Parker

George Clooney was at home in Los Angeles one afternoon in mid-January, a few days before he flew to Sudan in his new role as a United Nations “Messenger of Peace” (an appointment that overlooked reports of a recent public scuffle with Fabio, the leonine model). Clooney, who is unusual in being both very famous and, apparently, at ease with the fact—he can sometimes look like a spokesman for celebrity itself—was sitting on a long pale sofa, alongside Sarah Larson, his girlfriend. Bowls of chopped salad were on the coffee table in front of them: when Clooney’s electronic pepper grinder was activated, it sent a beam of light shining down onto the lettuce, like a police helicopter.

It was the “for your consideration” season—the run-up to the Oscars, when film studios lobby for the votes of Academy members, using means of varying subtlety. For some days, Clooney had been driven here and there in the back of a black Mercedes, and his presence at promotional cocktail parties had served as an advertisement for “Michael Clayton,” last year’s chilly corruption drama, in which he starred. (The film went on to be nominated in seven categories, including Best Actor; it received one Oscar, for Tilda Swinton, in a supporting part.) I had seen Clooney that morning, still in the role of candidate, in front of a bright-pink curtain on the stage of a theatre at the Hammer Museum, in Westwood, taking part in an Oscar-related panel discussion about acting and filmmaking, with Angelina Jolie, Daniel Day-Lewis, James McAvoy, and others. The event, organized by Newsweek, was leisurely, designed to encourage a degree of self-analysis, but Clooney (looking about as skinny as a young Sinatra, his sunglasses hooked over the opening of his collar) seemed to have set himself the task of resisting group drift toward actorly grandeur or celebrity griping. He was unremittingly affable. “We have time for one more question,” he said, after taking his seat. He traded running jokes with McAvoy, and made mock-scornful comments about Day-Lewis’s exalted reputation. (“You just kill it for the rest of us; we’ll take care of you, pal.”) He capped a conversation about paparazzi intrusions with a politic acknowledgment of the privileges of fame. His manner—nonchalance underpinned, it seemed, by vigilance and self-scrutiny—carried the suggestion that almost any divergence from banter was unforgivable artsy narcissism.

This is probably the performance for which Clooney, now forty-six, is still best known, even as he has become a Hollywood emperor, not to mention a left-leaning activist and a friend of Senator Barack Obama’s. Clooney is America’s national flirt, a pitchman on talk shows and red carpets who, against the background hum of the world’s lust and envy, is lightly ironic, clever, and self-deprecating, with furrowed brow and bobbing head, and a gyration in the lower jaw suggesting something being moved around under his tongue. This busy charm—a man on his way out to a party, feeling pretty good about his hair—was profitably packaged in “Ocean’s Eleven” and its two sequels, films that, more than anything, seemed to be oblique views of the A-list esprit de corps, real or imagined, that went into making them; they were fictions yearning to be “making of” documentaries. (Together, they earned more than a billion dollars.) And that charm was largely withheld, to effect, in the downbeat roles that Clooney took in “Syriana” and “Michael Clayton.” There he played hurting, unanchored men. In both cases, he was assigned a romantic partner—played by Greta Scacchi and Jennifer Ehle, in turn—who was edited out of the movie, with Clooney’s blessing. (Referring to his “Clayton” character—a back-room fixer in a New York law firm—Clooney explained to me, “If he’s loved, then he has a buffer, and somehow it isn’t as awful.”)

If these roles revealed some private, mournful corner of Clooney’s psyche, that corner has remained firmly private. In public, he has always seemed eager to please, even ebullient; and although his stardom has had an air of earlier, pre-therapeutic times—here is a man with a tidy small-town boyhood and a reported offscreen life of water-balloon fights and guys around the grill—some part of that eagerness has undermined the comparisons that are often made to another smoothie with a strong chin. There may be similarities between Clooney and Cary Grant, but the comparison falters at the level of physical movement. In one’s memory of Grant, he leans back a little. Clooney leans forward. Clooney’s masculinity is ambitious: he is a pickup artist, a flicker of locker-room towels. (Clooney, in 2005, speaking about suicide bombers: “But, really, who wants seventy virgins? I want eight pros.”) Cary Grant once advised a young actor who hoped to emulate him to wear silk underwear; Clooney’s appeal is less sleek and submerged—he is the fellow at the end of the bar, who, on a scale running from James Stewart to Jack Nicholson, has found an enviable midpoint of courteous roguishness.

I was introduced to Clooney after the panel discussion; his handshake became a shoulder squeeze, and he apologized for the thing taking so long. We got into his car. He was wearing jeans and a thin black sweater and high-laced black work boots. He looked tanned and a little worn, and my mind turned for a moment to “Leatherheads”—his latest film, a comedy about nineteen-twenties football, which he also directed—where it’s sometimes hard to see where his face ends and his beautifully thin brown leather jacket begins. He had a headache, the legacy of a gruesome spinal injury incurred in 2004, while filming a torture scene for “Syriana.” (He hit his head on a concrete floor; not long afterward, cerebrospinal fluid began to leak out of his nose.) His discomfort, which is fairly persistent, was today at the level of “eating ice cream too fast.” The panel discussion had lasted two hours, but he kept talking anyway, in a quiet, dry voice—about a guest saying “Listen, you’ve got my vote” at a “Michael Clayton” Oscar party (“That’s saying out loud what you were pretending wasn’t happening,” he told me, laughing), and a recent night out at a bar in Santa Monica after an award-giving event, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Javier Bardem, Benicio Del Toro, and Sean Penn, during which “we got hammered and we all came to the conclusion we wanted to be Javier Bardem.” He then carefully made the point that none of his closest friends are movie stars. “There are people you spend a lot of time with, and people you enjoy seeing at the office party,” he said—the office party, in this context, being the Venice Film Festival. Speaking of his “Ocean’s” co-stars Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, he said, “Brad and I talk, and Matt and I talk, on a fairly regular basis—text each other, give each other poo.” But, he continued, “I have my friends, nine guys for twenty-five years; they’re the guys I see every Sunday.”

We drove toward his house, which is on a steep, wooded lot in a prosperous but not quite movie-star neighborhood on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills. It was a sunny Saturday, and as the car turned into Clooney’s gated drive local residents were marching up the street toward the hiking trails at the top. He called out to Sarah Larson as he walked in; she was sitting in front of a laptop in the living room.

He bought this house in 1995, at the end of the first season of “E.R.”—the kinetic NBC hospital drama that allowed him to become something more than Tony Danza—and he never upgraded to a full Beverly Hills mansion. One can regard that as restraint, but only after acknowledging the eighteenth-century villa he owns on the shores of Lake Como, in Italy, where he spends several months a year, and the cliff-top home under construction in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Clooney lived and worked elsewhere for much of last year, and, in that time, the L.A. house was largely remodelled by Rande Gerber, a longtime friend, who is the owner and operator of many fancy bars, and the husband of Cindy Crawford, the model. The result is not extravagant, but it carries the hint of a hotel steakhouse under bold new management: dark wood, beige curtains, a chandelier. According to both men, Gerber made all the decisions, without a word of consultation: everything from the size of the swimming pool to the framed photograph of Steve McQueen in the living room. (“I didn’t know if George likes Steve McQueen,” Gerber told me.) In Clooney’s screening room, behind DVDs of “Once” and “All the President’s Men,” I saw a row of tall glass jars containing packaged candies, which I took to be a personal quirk until I read that Rande Gerber keeps packaged candies in tall glass jars in his offices in New York and Malibu. This all surely points more to the pressures on Clooney’s time than to a weirdly unformed sense of self, but it was nonetheless curious to hear Clooney joke, when we were standing in a leathery side room where his friends are allowed to smoke, “I suppose I have a flask collection”—pointing to a line of hip flasks on a shelf. The shelf faced a mantelpiece where the Oscar he won for his supporting role in “Syriana,” in 2006, stood.

On the kitchen counter, there was a single Post-It note with two words written on it: “Sydney Pollack.” His refrigerator contained many individual servings of watermelon, in plastic tubs. Sarah Larson joined us. She is twenty-nine (or, as he later put it, “Her grandmother has posters of me”), and she first met Clooney three years ago, in Las Vegas, where she was working as a hostess at Gerber’s Whiskey Bar, but she has been a public part of his life only since last September, when she broke some toes, and Clooney a rib, in a motorcycle accident in New Jersey. “You can’t outrun paparazzi on crutches,” she later said. She still has a home in Vegas, but now spends a large part of her time with Clooney.

He kissed her and asked, “You O.K.? Are you bored out of your mind?”

“No, just doing e-mail.”

She was genial and soft-spoken and seemed a little shy. He was bouncy. He scooped out some of the salad that Larson had made while he was out (“Oh, Miss Sarah!”) and dressed his with something sprayable called Balsamic Breeze, this process accompanied by joshing between them about calorie intake. “She’s trying to keep me from getting fat and old,” he said, although it sounded more as if she were teasing him for his own watchfulness. He made a joke about the pepper grinder doubling “as a marital aid.”

On the living-room couch, Larson stroked Clooney’s leg in a firm, one-way motion, as if brushing clean a billiard table, and then tried to flatten an unruly tuft of his hair. A flat-screen TV above the fireplace was tuned to MSNBC, the volume at an almost imperceptible murmur. To my left, I had a view of the back yard. On a grassy slope, a replica of the Hollywood sign made of letters just a foot or so high looked down on a small pool. Clooney said that he had a French friend who, on a visit, asked, “Is that the Hollywood sign? I thought it was much bigger.” He said, with some doubt in his voice, that he thought the letters were already in place when he bought the house.

At the public discussion that morning, James McAvoy had asked a question of his fellow-actors: “Do you ever consider the effect on an audience of the decisions that you make as an actor?” Daniel Day-Lewis, replying, said, “It doesn’t really occur to me that anybody is ever going to see the thing,” and McAvoy, at the other end of the table, said, “I’ve never done it that way. I think I’m too scared to, and that’s partly a controlling aspect with my personality, I suppose.” He said that, as he acts, he is thinking, “If I do this, will this have the effect on the audience that we want it to have at this point in the story?”

In the car, Clooney said of McAvoy, “I like a guy who says, ‘I’m probably not that actor’ ”—the actor lost in the role. “I find myself often feeling sort of those same sentiments, so it’s funny to hear someone else say it.” Now, on his sofa, he added, “I look at things like a director, even when I’m acting in a scene. I’ll think, Well, I’m going to have to really scream three scenes from now, because that’s when I’ve got to really let go; so I’ve got to hold back here, because you can’t scream all the way through—then it would be a movie about screaming.” He went on, “I’m jealous of Daniel. Let’s face it, we all are. I’m jealous of the ability to completely immerse yourself. Because it means you’re willing to not be liked for a period of time. Not just on film, perhaps.” (Clooney was referring to Day-Lewis’s intensity during filming, which has at times unnerved fellow actors.) “It’s part of the acting thing—is you sort of want to be liked.”

I later met Richard Kind, who has been a close friend of Clooney’s for twenty years—Kind is the actor who played a press secretary on the series “Spin City.” He and Clooney acted in a sitcom pilot together in 1987, as odd-couple brothers: Clooney a hunk, Kind a suited square. Off-screen, Clooney was the best man at Kind’s wedding. Kind told me, “I’m very protective of him. When I’m staying with him, I will never bring anyone to the house while he’s there. The reason? This is almost pathological: he has to entertain that new person. Even if he doesn’t want to, he will draw that person in with stories, and will entertain him. He could have been working all day, he could have a headache, it doesn’t matter, when he’s at that dinner, he’s got to talk to that person, and make that person . . . I don’t know whether it’s make that person like him, but he wants to make him feel at home.”

As befits a man who, at a charity auction last summer in the South of France, sold a kiss for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Clooney has an unusually alert sense of his sphere of influence; he is more closely guided than most by a diligent inner director. If he knows not to scream too loudly on camera, he is also an intelligent political propagandist—he can predict how he’ll sound on the six-thirty news. And he has taken the trouble to think his way into the mind of the person inching up to his restaurant table for an autograph, or the friend of a friend who has become a little dizzy in his presence. (“Your job is to find the best way for those people to hold on to their dignity,” he explained to me. “For a second, they have thrown it out. They got what they came for”—the autograph, the handshake—“but then they’re standing there feeling, God, that horrible taste in their mouth: ‘What now, how do I walk away?’ ” As Clooney described it, they have to be shown a path back to their normal selves.)

He is also a careful social planner. “He loves the guys and the camaraderie of the guys,” Kind said, talking of Clooney’s long-standing male friends, most of whom are connected to the entertainment industry. And then he added, “He loves the notion of the camaraderie.” This was an amplification, not a correction; but it hinted at Clooney’s social purposefulness, and I got a sense, in my conversations with him at home and, later, in his office, of the high value that Clooney places on set pieces that have the chance to lodge as almost cinematic memories—like various time-consuming practical jokes, or the occasion, some years ago, remembered by Clooney as “one of the greatest moments in my life,” when, on a day’s notice, he was able to hire a jet, gather together his friends, and arrive unannounced at the funeral of Kind’s father, in Trenton, New Jersey. (The unannounced part of this might seem odd to those outside the group, but it’s clear that Kind was touched.) In the late eighties, Clooney initiated boozy group golfing trips; more recently, he bulk-bought motorcycles for his friends, and he found the house in Italy, where friends drop by throughout the summer to eat slow meals outdoors, sometimes in the company of passing visitors such as Al Gore and Walter Cronkite. (He tries to arrange the summer into blocks of time: “I’ll go, O.K., until July 4th it’s friends without their kids.”) “There is actual work in keeping groups moving forward,” Clooney told me. “I’m perfectly willing to give up control”—as in the matter of the house renovation, perhaps—“but somebody has to be in control.” It’s no good, he said, with a likable hint of Martha Stewart in his manner, “if nobody’s asking, ‘Who wants wine?’ Maybe they’ll get wine or maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll get cheese, or maybe not.”

Clooney can be thought of as a studio of one—someone with the good sense and the resources to provide for himself what movie studios used to lay out for their contracted stars. So, for example, his driver is a broad-shouldered off-duty cop, which is a nice card to play in an argument with a paparazzo. There’s something similarly old-fashioned about the way a public version of Clooney’s private life has kept his actual privacy intact. He is incessantly winning but not confessional: the media gets its wine and cheese, and Clooney—without taking visible offense at any question, without ever taking the conversation off the record—holds on to his soul. A pet pig that, at times, slept in Clooney’s bed was, for many years, a substitute for details about other domestic partners. (The pig died in 2006, and has its own Wikipedia page.) There’s also the reputation for pranks: the stories of plastic wrap and Vaseline retailed by Clooney and co-stars on press junkets. In his new kitchen, Clooney has a little basket of mirth: a fake car license plate reading “ILUVCOK,” along with pre-printed envelopes someone gave him to send to friends that say things like “THE PORN YOU ORDERED.” There’s no doubt that Clooney has a taste for directing comic dramas that have an audience of just one or two, but when he showed these things the moment felt dutiful, and it seemed possible that the basket existed primarily for the benefit of visiting strangers. He trailed off, and rather sweetly said, “Oh, man, pretty funny, all things considered…”

His delivery suggested some hidden effort. “He does tend to decide the mood of the room, which, frankly, must feel like a bit of a strain for him,” Tilda Swinton told me in an e-mail. Swinton has become friends with Clooney since working with him on “Michael Clayton” and on the Coen brothers’ forthcoming “Burn After Reading,” his third film for them (a C.I.A.-related caper in which Clooney plays a U.S. marshal who wears a gold chain and considers himself “a bit of a Lothario,” Swinton said). “I don’t know whether he always found himself in this position, or if this is a byproduct of superstardom,” she wrote, adding, “I am sincerely fond of him. Would it be too peculiar to say that I feel somehow protective of him?” In his living room, Clooney said, “Remember, my dad did a hundred and fifty personal appearances a year.” In the sixties and seventies, when George was growing up, in a number of places near Cincinnati, his father, Nick, was a television star—a former d.j. who had become a talk-show and game-show host. In the Cincinnati area, he was a big star—“Elvis and Johnny Carson,” in George’s description. (Rosemary Clooney, the singer, who died in 2002, was Nick Clooney’s sister.) “So we, as a family, just went constantly everywhere, every day. It was, ‘O.K., we’ve got to go to the Germantown Fair.’ And we could all be arguing in the car. Not arguing, but Pop’s mad at me, and he’s really laying into me, and then my mom and dad are on edge, they’re not talking for a minute, like all parents—they’re certainly not fighters. Everything was edgy and nobody was talking, and it’s really, like, not a word is spoken in the car. And then the doors open and my sister and I get out of the car with my mom and dad, and there’s a hundred or two hundred people and it’s”—a shout—“ ‘Nick!’ and he’s got his arms around us, saying, ‘Hey, kids, get up there!’ ” Clooney mimed some big show-business gestures. “It’s the real version of ‘The show must go on.’”

“He comes from an entertainer’s line,” Swinton’s e-mail said. “This is the tradition he was brought up in, and in which he takes a true pride in advancing.” (Or, to use his own striking phrase: “I usually feel that time should be entertained.”) I later met Clooney’s parents. Nina Clooney has the lean elegance of Nancy Reagan in her First Lady days. Nick Clooney is tall and handsome, alternately wisecracking and frowningly sincere. He began to shift from entertainment to serious-minded news anchoring in the mid-seventies; he had a column in the Cincinnati Post until the paper closed, last year; and, in 2004, he ran for Congress, without success, as a Democrat.

“I think he was happy—the outward manifestations were that he was happy,” Nick Clooney said, speaking of George as a boy. A reporter who profiled Nick Clooney in 1975, when George was fourteen, wrote, “When his children were young, Ada, in particular, resented that Nick was a public person.” (Ada, Clooney’s older sister, who was widowed not long ago, lives in Kentucky with her two children.) Clooney gives no sign of resentment now—instead, there’s a romantic description of a small-town high school, in Augusta, Kentucky, and vacation time spent hanging around his father’s TV studio. But it’s clear that Nick Clooney was busy and fairly absent, and that the regime at home was strict and adult-oriented. (“My God, chew with your mouth open, you’d be grounded,” Clooney said.)

It’s also evident that Clooney is glad to have his father’s attention as an adult; he refers to him often and enjoys the phrase “son of a newsman.” George Clooney is a nostalgic man, but his nostalgia—for old Hollywood, old Vegas, live TV—seems fed as much by his father’s memories as by his own. In a way that is perhaps connected to his father’s career, Clooney has always been appreciative of the fellowship of the TV studio or the film location. Grant Heslov, a friend and producing partner of Clooney’s, told me, “He likes joking around, bullshitting, and the sense of community and family you feel on a film set.” That world has often been his subject, implicitly or explicitly. In 1997, in an early sign of ambitions beyond acting, Clooney successfully lobbied for a live episode of “E.R.” Three years later, he was the star and an executive producer of a live black-and-white remake of “Fail-Safe,” the Cold War thriller, on CBS. A story of men under stress trying to save the world, it was also an advertisement, inevitably, for filmmaking under stress; you could almost hear the high fives as the credits rolled. When Clooney began to direct, his first two films were about TV stars of earlier times. “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002) was based on the delusional memoirs of Chuck Barris, the host of “The Gong Show”; and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005) told of Edward R. Murrow’s resistance to Senator Joseph McCarthy. In that film, the crucible of courage was explicitly the world behind the camera: the men doing the right thing were making TV.

Nick Clooney lived in L.A. for a while in the fifties, and took a few minor acting jobs. At that time, Rosemary Clooney was a very successful singing star, and was married to José Ferrer, the actor. George said of his father, “I think he stayed for some time and then thought, I have to do something, and also he didn’t want to compete with Rosemary.” He returned to Kentucky, found work in radio, and in 1959 married Nina, whom he met when she competed in a beauty pageant that he hosted. By the time George was born, Rosemary was a lesser star (and her nephew’s observation of her professional decline, and of her eventual addiction to prescription drugs, later contributed to his own career watchfulness). But she still had a house on Roxbury Drive, in Beverly Hills; on visits, Clooney encountered “an opulence I couldn’t imagine.” Miguel Ferrer, his cousin, who also became a well-known actor, had a little electric car. “It looked like a Ferrari,” Clooney recalled. “We rode it around on the tennis court.”

When I spoke to Richard Kind, he said, “I believe George is a star because—I don’t know if I want to say this—‘I’ll show them,’ you know. ‘I will not be put in the background.’ ” Clooney moved to L.A. in 1982, after failing to break into professional baseball, and after a year and a half as a feckless journalism student at Northern Kentucky University. Ben Weiss, now a friend of Clooney’s and an assistant director of television shows, met him almost the moment he arrived. Weiss has a memory of an overexcited country boy: “Driving, he’d be, ‘Look at that girl, look at that girl, look at that girl. Wow, wow.’ ”

“I was always ambitious—I had a work ethic,” Clooney said, talking of his career before “E.R.” “I was making a couple of hundred grand a year, which is beating all the odds, so you don’t really think things are going terribly. You actually feel like you’re succeeding.” He had taken small parts in movies; he signed a contract with Warner Bros. that put him in TV pilots; he had recurring roles on “Roseanne” and then “Sisters.” All the same, Clooney said, “I wished I was doing better projects, and I didn’t think I was going to get that chance.” He was unhappiest, he said, at “Roseanne,” where he was burdened, as he has rarely been since, with a largely unlikable character: he played a bumptious factory manager, Roseanne’s boss. Clooney told me that he quit just before he was fired. “You’re funny with all your friends on the set—and then you can’t get a laugh, and you can just hear the writers scratching your name out of the script. It’s hard on your soul, you know, at that point, because you can just feel it being taken away.” Around this time, he married Talia Balsam, an actress, in Las Vegas; they were divorced after a few years. He has not since remarried, and he has no children. When I asked him about childlessness, he said, “I don’t think about this,” in an easygoing way. Then the phone rang. He laughed as he stood to answer it, and Larson said, “Saved by the bell.”

“E.R.” was an immediate, spectacular hit. (“Forty-five million people a week—and now there are hits with twenty million people, sixteen million,” Clooney said.) To many of those millions, Clooney’s doe-eyed Doug Ross was a mesmerizing combination of sexual availability and professional maturity, of guy and man. As Clooney saw it, Ross was “the perfect character to have on TV. In the first show, I’m chasing chicks—a bunch of girls—I’m drunk, I don’t do my job particularly well, but at the end of it I stick up for a kid! You can’t do anything wrong in film and television if you go, ‘You touch that kid and I’ll kick your bum’; it’s a great set-you-free thing.” Clooney had further protected his position: Dr. Ross, as first written, was really no more than “a smarmy schmuck” in his dealings with women. At Clooney’s suggestion, the show’s producers allowed him to become a serious and energetic flirt—to have Ross “earnestly trying to pick them up—a guy who’s on the make, really on the make, not the one you can make fun of.”

Clooney visited New York with Ben Weiss not long after the show’s début, and saw that strangers were treating him differently. “All of a sudden people were: ‘Hey, George!’ They knew my name—not my character, but my name. Benny said, ‘You just got famous.’ That was a very satisfying moment. I suppose that’s what you’re always looking for.” When I spoke to Weiss, he remembered that trip, and he also remarked on his unending astonishment at the boldness of women who try to snag Clooney in public places: “It’s still amazing to me—literally lining up. When one steps away, another one steps in. These are smart, pretty women, thinking, I’ll do something I won’t normally do.”

Clooney worked on “E.R.” for five seasons. In his spare time, he became a film star, elevated to the highest ranks by two noisy, expensive films: “Batman & Robin,” in 1997, and “The Perfect Storm,” three years later. But before leaving “E.R.” he had already begun to make himself available as a heartthrob lure, drawing funds to quieter, cleverer movies. Clooney once spoke with Steven Spielberg on the set of “E.R.”; Spielberg watched his performance on a monitor, and, tapping the screen, said, “If you stop moving your head around, you’ll be a movie star.” Clooney’s career has been more than a search for a still head, but his best performances, in these more modest movies, have involved constraint, one way or another. One thinks of him jammed into the trunk of a car with Jennifer Lopez, in “Out of Sight,” directed by Steven Soderbergh (who became a friend and a producing partner); or, some years later, in Stephen Gaghan’s “Syriana”—Clooney slowed down by thirty-five extra pounds. (He told me that Matt Damon, his co-star, did not immediately recognize him after a month spent stuffing himself with tiramisu and beer in Italy: “It wasn’t just that I was heavier and I had a beard, and shaved my hairline back. Matt said, ‘You just seemed so sad.’ Because it’s not just about being heavier, which is a drag, but it’s also about not being active at all—that just really depresses the poo out of you.”)

In “Michael Clayton,” too, Clooney was carrying what in his world is extra weight—he put on ten pounds or so, because “I didn’t want him to be in really rocking shape”; more important, the character deprived him of what he called “certain veneers you use to keep the room going.” There’s barely a sign of his habit of snatched, semi-facetious smiles. Tilda Swinton said, “I think the opportunity to show something interior and disconnected from the traffic of his natural, active charisma must have constituted a nice change in his life.” She called his “Michael Clayton” performance “extraordinarily sophisticated.” I asked Clooney about the film’s end, where he sits in a New York taxi, in a solitary fog of shame and reckoning. He said that before starting the shot, which is held on the screen for three unblinking minutes, he had decided to spend the time replaying the events of the film in his head. But the shoot was in New York and the street wasn’t closed, and his taxi took up two lanes, because of all the lights attached to it. So people noticed, and bellowed his name, which amused the crew. “Instead of an actor’s exercise, it was an exercise in not cracking up,” Clooney said.

Remembering Spielberg’s comment, Clooney said, “It was a funny thing; when you do a lot of television, over the years you tend to try to do too much. Most of the time you’re not the lead, and you’re, ‘O.K., I’m going to be eating potato chips!’ ” He mimed someone throwing food into his mouth. “You’re trying to fill the screen with business all the time.” He added, “When you’re unsure is when you start to move. When you don’t know what you’re going to say.” In 1998, on the unhappy set of “Three Kings,” David O. Russell, the director, urged Clooney to be still but, Clooney said, “did everything in the world to make it impossible to be still, including rewriting while you’re talking on camera.” Clooney’s memories of “Three Kings” include Russell shouting, “Why don’t you worry about your fucked-up acting!” Although Russell has been quoted calling Clooney “a super-political, extremely manipulative guy,” his comment today is: “I feel lucky we got to make a really good film together.” Their “Three Kings” relationship ended in a brawl, and with a reminder that, when a star enables a film to be green-lit, he is a god feigning mortality for the duration of the shoot. “There is sort of an understanding that you are giving the power you actually have away to the director of the film,” Clooney said. In this case, Clooney lost patience with what he saw as Russell’s mistreatment of others as well as himself, and made a phone call to Warner Bros. that had the effect, as Clooney saw it, of taking directorial authority away from Russell. “David sat and sort of pouted for the last two weeks of the shoot, and then we wrapped,” he said.

Clooney is one of a very small group of people who, when asked to consider the most satisfying parts of their lives, begin to describe business meetings: “Sitting in a room with a bunch of people who don’t want to make a film that you know is the right film to make. You’ll say, ‘You guys are going to hate this.’ I never thought I’d be in a position to say to someone, ‘I know you don’t want to make this movie, but if I’m doing it for free I can get it done somewhere.’ ” One can imagine the avidity with which Clooney began a career in film directing. He said to me that directing was “a thousand times” as satisfying as acting; “I consider my life as being a director.”

Clooney has a production company called Smoke House, named in honor of a Tudor-timbered old-Hollywood restaurant just outside the perimeter of the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. On the lot, Clooney’s offices are in Jack Warner’s old bungalow—low ceilings and thick carpets—in the shadow of the soundstage where “E.R.” is still made. When I met Clooney there at lunchtime one day, he arrived alone in a growling black Porsche, looking deservedly proprietorial: this is where he made “Sisters” and “E.R.,” and about a dozen films, including the “Ocean’s” series. “And now I’m like the mayor of Warner Bros.,” he said. Clint Eastwood has offices in the bungalow next door. Clint Eastwood!” Clooney said. “He comes out, ‘Hey man, how are you doing?’ We sit by our cars and talk.”

Grant Heslov, Clooney’s friend and his partner at Smoke House, is a former actor, and the co-writer and producer of “Good Night, and Good Luck.” When that film was made, Clooney was still in partnership with Steven Soderbergh. Section Eight, the company they formed in 2000, used to be in the same bungalow and enjoy the same Warner Bros. embrace; it produced the films that each of them directed, and other television shows and movies, including “Syriana.” Clooney said that the dissolution of Section Eight, in the summer of 2006, was long-planned and amicable—although, when the moment came, it was not unwelcome. “You stop being necessarily the creative force,” he said. “You start giving notes on posters and trailers.” It may be interesting to monitor the future influence on Clooney of Soderbergh, whose work has at times been impatient with exposition, aloofly absorbed in private pleasures. (There’s a taste of this sensibility in “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”) And one wonders if Clooney—a connoisseur of nineteen-seventies films by such American directors as Alan J. Pakula, Bob Rafelson, and Hal Ashby, but an instinctive enemy of the loucheness and ego display that sometimes went into making them—will ever again risk working with actors or directors who, like David O. Russell, might get on his nerves. (Clooney has an impeccable record in casting—Sam Rockwell in “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”; David Strathairn in “Good Night, and Good Luck”—but he has not yet directed a full-scale male movie star.) Smoke House’s plans include a film based on “Our Brand Is Crisis,” the recent documentary about the role of James Carville’s political consultancy in the Bolivian Presidential elections of 2002; another project, to be written and directed by Clooney, will tell the story of the Americans given sanctuary by Canadian diplomats in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis.

When I met Clooney, he was making his last adjustments to “Leatherheads,” which is Smoke House’s début. In a corner of his office, football helmets used in the movie, wrapped in clear plastic bags, were spilling out of a box. Clooney said that he significantly rewrote a fifteen-year-old script—although the Writers Guild of America did not award him a formal share of the credit, to his immense private annoyance—to make a screwball comedy, of a rather effortful kind. When Clooney’s character fights, he blows out his cheeks; when he thinks, he pushes back his helmet to scratch his head. And the audience may wonder: How charming can charm be when it recognizes itself? “Leatherheads” is “not designed to change the world—it’s just designed to be good fun,” Clooney said, seeming to anticipate critical disappointment. “I was afraid of becoming ‘that issues guy’ ”—because of “Syriana” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” “I wanted to do something completely different. I want to be a director, and if you’re an issues-guy director then the issues change and you’re out, that’s it, you’re done.” (He also broke with recent tradition by putting himself in a romantic role, opposite Renée Zellweger, reminding us of how little onscreen wooing Clooney has allowed himself: his film characters have tended to keep to the company of men, and keep their shirts on.) The reviews, when they came, were unenthusiastic.

Asked to describe what kind of director he is, Clooney said, “I’m fun. I do know that. I keep the set fun.” And then, “I’m as prepared as anybody you’ll meet, or anybody I’ve worked with. Doesn’t mean I’m as good, I’m just prepared. I can show you storyboards this thick, with every single shot and every single scene. Every frame. Literally every shot.”

In a little satchel, Clooney had the lines that he’d been asked to read at the Oscars, then a few days away, to introduce a montage of historical clips. Just before leaving his office, he read aloud, “ ‘Eighty years of memorable moments, eye-popping productions, wistful nostalgia, hysterical highlights, gut-wrenching emotions can’t be summarized in mere minutes, but the attempt to capture the essence of the world’s most anticipated awards show is worth the effort.’ ” He stopped and raised his eyebrows. “That’s not going to happen.”

“You haven’t heard the message we had?” Clooney asked Sarah Larson, when they were sitting on the sofa in L.A. “It’s about you, you know.”

She was a little taken aback. “What?” she said. “What?”

“It’s right here. Listen to this.” He stood up and tried to make the telephone give up its voicemail. “Is this the volume? Where’s the volume? I’m losing my mind.” (His friends say that he is not good with domestic technology: he later told me that he had no real idea how to use the Internet; and he had a bit of trouble with the espresso maker that he is paid a fortune to advertise in Europe.) Someone had repeatedly called on his private line, and had then left an odd message. “It’s not a prank—none of my friends would do that,” Clooney said. He found the right switch, and we heard a calm, middle-aged male voice: “Dude, your friends asked me to give you a message: Dump the bitch before you’re sorry.”

After a moment’s pause, Larson said, “ ‘Before you’re sorry’?”

“ ‘Before you’re sorry,’ ” Clooney said, with a laugh. “ ‘Dump the bitch before you’re sorry.’ ” The message was perhaps fan mail of a perverse kind, from a Clooney admirer in some way disappointed with Larson—for being young, or for being a non-celebrity and therefore an interloper. (There’s been some unpleasant press, and Larson brought it up with me: “They say that I’m a stripper. There’s a ton of stuff about that. I’ve never been a stripper. You know, just because I’m from Las Vegas I must be a stripper. Because I’m a cocktail server that means I’m an escort.”) Or it might have been a wrong number. Larson was not aghast, but she did not seem quite comfortable, either. Clooney, though, was punchy, seeming to accept the voicemail as no more than a test of his good humor: a chance to reconfirm his efficient, uncomplaining handling of the complications of a public life.

He said that, with the help of his police-officer driver, the number had been traced to a pre-paid cell phone. Now they were trying to find out if the suspect had paid by credit card. But—Clooney laughed—“there are certain laws that, you know, that are applicable.” And then, to Larson: “It’s wild, isn’t it? Isn’t that interesting?”

“Yeah,” Larson said.

According to Tilda Swinton, fame is George Clooney’s “vocation.” He has at times spoken for other celebrities; in the mid-nineties, he organized a boycott of “Entertainment Tonight” in response to the practices of “Hard Copy,” its sister show at Paramount; more recently, he encouraged people to send fake celebrity sightings to Gawker, the New York media-gossip Web site, in order to disrupt its Gawker Stalker feature. This year, apparently for no other reason than that it seemed that it should be so, Clooney became touted as a Messenger of Peace in the Writers Guild dispute. And at the Oscar-related panel discussion in L.A., it was Clooney who made sure to put something on record about th