“I think that Clark Gable, literally, just now, turned over in his grave.” He smiles. “And Kate Hepburn too.”

Giving off a retro vibe has served Clooney quite well. His second directorial effort - the black and white “Good Night and Good Luck” - wound up earning him Academy Award nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Director. Clooney didn’t win but managed to take home a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as an embittered CIA agent in “Syriana.”

“I keep hearing, ‘What did it mean to you to win the Oscar after all the years of struggling,” says Clooney. “Well, my answer is that it didn’t suck. There is an interesting thing that happens. There is this great celebration. You’re really excited. You call all your friends. Your friends call you. That part takes about a day. And then suddenly, it’s like, ‘Now what?’ It doesn’t make any difference. I can’t carry my Oscar with me into the meetings at the studio. Well, I could carry it in, but they don’t really care at all. It’s still just as difficult to get a seven-million dollar film or a 70-million dollar film financed.”

Case in point is Clooney’s latest picture - the black-and-white, ’40s-set spy thriller “The Good German,” which marks Clooney’s fifth film with frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh. Warner Bros. agreed to bankroll the flick as long as Soderbergh kept the budget under $40 million. In the picture, Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a journalist who returns to post-war Berlin to cover the Potsdam Peace Conference only to find himself entangled in a murder mystery involving his shady driver (Tobey Maguire) and a mystery woman (Cate Blanchett) Jake dated before the war.

In a nutshell, it’s the story about how nobody gets away clean. Soderbergh believes ambitious films like “The Good German” only get made thanks to stars like Clooney who are willing to take chances on less-than-commercial projects. “It’s because you have a big star like George who takes risks that the studio allows you to do something different,” Soderbergh explains. “George has really proven himself a filmmaker who will step outside the box.”

Inspired by classic films like “Casablanca” and “The Third Man,” Soderbergh decided to shoot “The Good German” in the noir tradition, not only thematically but technically. Rather than going to Berlin, Soderbergh and company shot the entire film on the Warner Bros. back lot employing vintage camera lenses, an old-style score, and rear-projections for background shots.

“Personally, I know those old classic films backwards and forwards, all of them, and especially the films from the ’40s and early ’50s,” notes Clooney. “Steven gave us a couple of films to look at, just to get that rhythm of speaking. So we all sat around and watched ‘Humoresque’ with John Garfield and ‘Out of the Past’ with Robert Mitchum. I know those films really well. I’ve been watching those films my whole life.”

While he was shooting “The Good German,” Clooney was so busy promoting “Good Night and Good Luck” and “Syriana” that he didn’t have a chance to plot out his trademark pranks. But Clooney hasn’t started taking himself - or his success - too seriously. Ask him about working with Blanchett and the first thing he mentions is her sense of humor.

“Cate was doing a German accent in this really heavy piece, but I didn’t have to sit there and be miserable with her,” he says admiringly. “She didn’t speak German all day long and wear you down. She’d sit around and talk to you. Her kids would come by the set and you’d have a great day with her.”

Clooney also offers his seal of approval to co-star Tobey Maguire. “Tobey’s fun,” he says. “But that fight scene [where the diminutive Maguire beats up Clooney] - I think I should’ve won that one. But he’s Spider-Man. I think that Spider-Man kicks an old Batman’s ass.”

Clooney is always willing to poke fun at his past failures. Unlike many movie stars, he has a clear-eyed take on his own filmography. In the wilderness years following his exit from “E.R,” Clooney tried and failed to make it on the big screen with duds like “Batman & Robin,” “One Fine Day” and “The Peacekeeper.” It wasn’t until Soderbergh gave him the role of a suave bank robber in “Out of Sight” that Clooney flexed his leading-man muscle. Since then, he’s enjoyed hits with “The Perfect Storm,” “Three Kings,” “Good Night and Good Luck,” “Syriana” and, especially, “Ocean’s Eleven.”

The actor, who just completed “Ocean’s Thirteen” with pals Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, is honest about his own disappointment with “Ocean’s Twelve.”

“We thought ‘Twelve’ didn’t quite catch it,” says Clooney, who’s also prepping his next directorial effort “Leatherheads” for 2008 release. “We felt there were two-thirds of a good film there. And it fell short in a couple of places. We wanted another crack at it and came up with a really good idea for this one, which is revenge. Plus, we have Al Pacino in this one. Man, oh man. There is a guy who really loves acting. Most actors get to a certain age and it’s just about a paycheck. They don’t give a damn. Al just loves it. He’s into it. He’s an exciting guy to have on the set.” (Times-Leader)

After our press con with him, he met with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The 45-year-old briefed Annan about the trips he made to China and Egypt to help find solutions to the Darfur conflict. “All of us can report that the situation is at best grave and about to get much worse,” the famous Democrat was quoted by AP as saying. “They (refugees) are all alone, and workers are leaving, are being kicked out on a massive scale, leaving these people their last great task—watching their families die one by one.”
The socially committed person is always there, bubbling underneath the wisecracks. He spoke soberly when he was asked questions about Darfur during the interview. But in this column, we focus more on the light side of George.
While some of his famous friends are getting married and having babies, George has stayed single. Many predict that he will be a happy bachelor for the rest of his life, claiming that he is commitment-phobic. Many don’t know, though, that he did get married once, in 1989—to Talia Balsam, daughter of actor Martin Balsam. The marriage ended in a divorce in 1992.
George stars with Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire in “The Good German,” a period drama set in the ruins of post-World War II Berlin. The Oscar and Golden Globe-winning actor portrays a US Army war correspondent who becomes embroiled with a former lover (Cate) who is trying to escape her past. It was shot by director Steven Soderbergh in black and white, using the conventions of filmmaking circa 1940s, complete with an airport scene that’s a homage to “Casablanca.”
George and Steven were recently in the news after they announced that they will shut down their film company, Section 8, which produced such acclaimed films as “Good Night, and Good Luck” and “Syriana.” Of course, George made a joke about it in the press con.
Wearing a navy suit with a white dress shirt, his hair slickly combed, George looked like a matinee idol from Hollywood’s golden era. This nephew of the late singer, Rosemary Clooney, never fails to win strangers. We’ve written about the premiere party of “Syriana” last year at the New York Public Library. While his fellow stars secluded themselves upstairs, he was down there with the rest of the guests on the main floor, managing to meet and chat whoever came up to him. At parties, he’ll make you feel like he’s really conversing with you.
In “Syriana,” you got beaten up. In this movie, you also get beaten up. Any explanation?
Well, it has done me very well. I got beaten up in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” You guys gave me a Golden Globe. I got beaten up in “Syriana.” I got another Golden Globe. I just kept getting the hell beaten out of me (laughter). I like characters who go in leading with their chin and then realize that they’re in over their head. Those are always fun characters to me.
No romantic lead roles coming up?
I’ll be doing one now. “Leatherheads” is a romantic comedy, the one that I’ve been writing and working on and I’m going to direct. We are starting that film on the first of the year with Renee Zellweger.
Can you talk some more about Renee?
I just love her. She’s a dear friend. I sent her the script the day I finished it and I said, ‘Are you interested?’ She sent it back, saying, ‘When do we start?’ That’s a nice place to be when you can have an actor of that caliber ready to go to work. I’m really excited about that.
Were you romantically involved with Renee at all?
We lived together for nine years (laughter). A lot of people didn’t know that. We have several children. We adopted (laughter).
If you can address the notion of romantic love versus real love…
You know, I am the expert on romantic and real love (laughter) and probably the exact person to come to for this question. I’m glad you asked (laughter).
You mean romanticizing the idea of love as opposed to the realities? I think everybody in the world has a very grand idea of what it should be like and then there’s the reality of waking up with someone with bad breath. There’s a difference but I am certainly not the expert on love although Steven (Soderbergh) and I have been dating for quite some time now (laughter). Did you think that Section 8 broke up because there was a fight between Steven and me?
Yes.
Really? (Laughter). Yeah, you’re right. I don’t like him. We were telling the truth.
Inquirer

“I could do the whole of it – sung, too. I was brought up with the whole bit, Catholic school, confession every week, everything.

“Confession was funny because I grew up in this tiny, tiny, tiny town in Kentucky, 1, 500 people in the whole town and only about 10 kids who were Catholic.

“Now, when you’re seven years old, you don’t really have a lot to confess, but you had to show up anyway, and I remember figuring out at one point that because there were so few of us, the priest would know who we all were. So I decided that I would only confess the things that I thought were OK for him to hear.”
He stops and shakes his head, laughing.

There are a handful of us hanging out with George in the fancy Beverly Hills hotel and it is not difficult to spot which of us were brought up Catholic. The clue is that all the Catholics are laughing with him, and all the others are looking faintly puzzled. Not that George notices. He is on a roll.

“But what to do about the other sins, right? I’d read somewhere about a saint who would put a pebble in her shoe and walk around on it for penance. So what I’d do is, I’d go to confession and just confess what I wanted to confess. And then when I got home, I’d fill both of my shoes with gravel, and I’d jump right off the top of my bunk bed straight on to them. That way, I was completely cleansed of all the sins, and I’d still avoided telling stuff to the priest!”

By now, the non-Catholics are exchanging glances and edging surreptitiously towards the door. But George has not yet started on his schooldays. “Did you ever get paddled?” he demands, cheerfully. “You know, where a priest would take a two-handed paddle and hit you with it – you’d stick books in your back, but he’d really whale you with this thing, and it would hurt. Very different from the regular school, where if you did something wrong, it was no big deal, but in my school, they’d say, ‘I’m going to send you down to Fr Brinker’s office,’ and you’d be like oooooh, nooooo!

“You certainly learned discipline, and I grew up with a great sense of structure and respect. But you know, I was talking about this with a friend the other day, and we were saying that these days if teachers ever hit kids as hard as the priests used to do back then, they would probably go to jail.”

You would never mistake George Timothy Clooney for a victim of childhood abuse. He’s 45 now, and the boyish good looks have long given way to the attractive elegance of a middle-aged man who is supremely comfortable in his own skin. In his profession, he has moved from playing the hunky heart-throb of television’s ER to, not only acting in film, but writing, directing, and producing too.

Off the screen, he is an outspoken political activist and Democratic campaigner, who is currently using his potent combination of energy and star power to help bring world attention to the tragedy of genocide that is happening in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

“It’s the big one we’ve really got to keep pushing right now,” he says of the latter. “It’s a very, very complex issue, because it’s a terrible situation but the question is what to do about it. My job is to try to bring light on to this wherever we can. We’re going to try to do something over Christmas, get a delegation over there, keep pushing it every which way,” he stops and laughs. “But I can’t talk too much about this right now, because if I do, they won’t give me a visa!”

Joking aside, he admits that his outspoken political stance has earned him some enemies along the way. Well … almost.

“I do have this guy that starts my car for me and tastes my food before I eat it … No, I’ll tell you something. There was a time back in 2003 when some feeling against me was really bad, people were out in front of theatres protesting my films, they put stuff over the internet calling me a traitor, there was that moment where paranoia creeps in and you start to think, ‘Well, am I getting myself into trouble here?’ But that’s your own paranoia and your own narcissism, and if you think about it for a bit, you realise that these conspiracies against one particular person take a lot of work, and if anyone were going to do anything to anyone, they would focus on someone who is actually much more politically relevant than I am. Look, I’m a big kid now, I can take criticism. And let’s face it, I can’t argue the idea of freedom of speech and then say, ‘Oh, but don’t say bad things about me,’ can I?’

He says he got both his sense of humour and his sense of social responsibility from his Dad, television news veteran Nick Clooney, with whom he is working closely on the Darfur project. His ability to roll with the punches, he inherited from his beloved Aunt Rosemary – singer Rosemary Clooney, who died of lung cancer in 2002.

“I once asked Aunt Rosemary why she was a better singer at 80 than she had been at 28,” he says. “Cause when she was old, she couldn’t hit the notes she could at 28, and she couldn’t hold them as long, but she was still a better singer. And she said: ‘I’m a better singer because I don’t have to prove I can sing any more.’ She was amazing, Aunt Rosemary. Years ago, when I was starting out, I used to be her chauffeur – her and Martha Rae and Kay Ballard and Kay Starr and Margaret Whiting and Helen O’Connell, which was fun. They were doing a show, Four Girls Four, with Tony Bennett, and I’d stand in the wings with this tall glass of vodka – no ice – and the guy on the stage would say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Helen O’Connell,’ and Helen would come into the wings and snap her fingers for the glass, and I’d hand it to her, and she’d down the whole thing, and then just walk out onto the stage and sing ‘Tangerine’. It was a great, great way to grow up.”

It is a long time since George has supplemented his income by playing chauffeur to anyone. One of the top box-office draws in Hollywood, he will be seen next year in The Good German, a moody black-and-white love story-thriller set in Berlin just after the end of World War Two. The film has already drawn comparisons with Casablanca and The Third Man.

“I’m a huge fan of Bogart,” he admits. “He was willing to be the bad guy and that’s why you loved him – he mastered playing this sort of hapless jerk whom you really root for along the way.

“I can’t think of any other movie star who could have pulled off To Have and Have Not or The Maltese Falcon, and made you like the characters. He was extraordinary.”

He was also pretty much the opposite of the romantic, handsome young men George has specialised in playing in the past. George says that these days, although he’s happy occasionally to slip into Danny Ocean’s tuxedo and have some fun, there are compensations to growing older, too.

“I have gotten to a place in my career where those elements that were used to sell you when you were younger aren’t really the tools that you can use any more, and I’m actually kind of happy with that. I’m enjoying moving into the character actor role. I’ve always side-stepped people’s expectations in my career, and now I’m glad I have, because if I was still playing only the romantic comedy-type parts, people would be saying, ‘Y’know, he’s 45 and doesn’t look so young any more, got a lot of grey hair … maybe we’ll go get somebody else for that part.’”
He pauses: “Anyway, it’s fun to do a variety of work. I’m having a good time.”

There’s just one thing missing in George Clooney’s life, and that is a wife and children to share his house in the Hollywood Hills and his beloved villa overlooking Lake Como in northern Italy.

Ask him about his single state and he sighs.

“I’m not planning to write a book on ‘How to Have A Successful Relationship’,” he once joked a little ruefully – but he does take care to mention that, if there is no steady woman in his life, there are at least a lot of children he is close to.

“I’m uncle to a couple, and I’m godfather to about 12 or 13 more. At my house in Los Angeles on Sundays there’s always friends coming over and we have a barbecue and there’s a bunch of kids around. I’m good with kids, I like them.”

He decides he has been serious for long enough. “I’m also considering adoption,” he adds, deadpan. The journalists in the room sit up.

“Everyone else is doing it these days, so why not me? I’m going to adopt a 24-year-old girl. Good-looking. With plenty of cash ….”

If he ever does settle down she’ll be a lucky woman.