Rosemary Clooney , Clooney
was born May 6, 1961, in Lexington, KY. He made his first television appearance
at age five, on his father's talk show , The Nick Clooney
Show . He did not show up again on television until he was in his early
twenties; growing up, Clooney had a passion for baseball and
only turned to acting after a failed tryout with the Cincinnati Reds. He started
out in television commercials and then signed with Warner Bros.
Though he essentially remained unknown throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Clooney
had a steady career as a supporting actor. He appeared in 15 failed
television pilots and was a semi-regular on several series, including sitcoms
like The Facts of Life and Roseanne ,
and the drama Sisters . When the 1990s medical drama
E.R. became a smash hit, Clooney
became particularly popular, owing somewhat to his appeal to young women. This
appeal increased as his character -- initially something of a callous womanizer
-- matured with the show, eventually evolving into a thoroughly decent, if somewhat
hotheaded, human being. Up until E.R. , Clooney
had played only occasional roles in feature films (he made his debut with a small
role in the 1986 movie Combat High ) and had starred in a couple
of low-budget videos. Following E.R. 's success, however, he
found himself besieged by scripts and movie offers. For his first big-budget project,
he chose to play an action hero in the Quentin Tarantino
-written and -produced schlock horror extravaganza
From Dusk Till Dawn . After that, he appeared in the romantic
comedy One Fine Day opposite Michelle Pfeiffer
. For Clooney , 1997 proved to be a good year, as he
appeared in three major films, the most hyped of which was Batman &
Robin , with the actor replacing Val Kilmer as the
mysterious Dark Knight. Though the film is widely considered the worst of the
big-screen Batman series, Clooney did receive
some praise for bringing an extra sensitivity to his interpretation of Batman
. He received greater praise the following year, with roles in two wildly
divergent films, Out of Sight , in which he played a suave bank
robber, and Terrence Malick 's adaptation of The Thin
Red Line . In 1999 -- following his much-talked-about departure from
E.R. -- he continued to work on a number of high-profile projects,
first lending his voice to the animated South Park: Bigger, Longer, and
Uncut and then starring alongside Mark Wahlberg and
Ice Cube as an American soldier reclaiming Kuwaiti treasure
from Saddam Hussein in David O. Russell 's
Three Kings . George Clooney was awarded
a 2000 Golden Globe for his portrayal of a pomade-obsessed escaped convict in
the Coen brothers' throwback comedy O Brother Where
Art Thou? It was around this time that Clooney , now
an established actor equally as comfortable on the big screen as the small, began
to branch out as the Executive Producer of such made-for-TV efforts as Killroy
(1999) and Fail Safe (2000). Soon producing such features
as Rock Star (2001) and Insomnia (2002), Clooney
next re-teamed with Out of Sight director Steven
Soderbergh for a modern take on a classic Rat Pack /comedy
with Ocean's Eleven (2001). After the dynamic film duo stuck
together for yet another remake, the deep-space psychological science-fiction
drama Solaris (2002), busy Clooney would both
produce and appear in Welcome to Collinwood and Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind later the same year, also making his directorial
debut on the latter. |
