George Clooney, in his 60s
He has been a pediatrician and Batman, a committed actor and prolific director, but what he has done best is perhaps the role of the charming villain.
George Clooney is now in his sixties, although it has probably been difficult for many to get used to the idea that he was in his fifties: we have known him more or less all since, in the middle of his thirties, he became emergency pediatrician Doug Ross in the ER series - Doctors on the front line. He became so famous with that role that it is often underestimated how good he was at breaking away from it at the right time, just before the 1990s ended.
After being Doug Ross, George Clooney was everything: funny actor, handsome but normal actor like-black and white, and busy actor (and above all director). But also a golden bachelor, sexiest man in the world, husband of an esteemed humanitarian lawyer and one of those who have been told that, if he wanted to, he could aspire to become president.
Clooney was born on May 6, 1961 in Lexington, Kentucky, but much of his childhood was spent in Ohio. He was able to savor a bit of show business from an early age, since his father was a radio and television host and his aunt was a singer who had also acted with Bing Crosby. And it seems that his cousin actor Miguel Ferrer, who died in 2017 after enjoying that particular but widespread cinematic fame of face-more-well-known-than-the-name, had some merit in launching him into an acting career.
Clooney began acting in his early twenties in E / R, a sitcom set in the emergency room (our emergency room) of a Chicago hospital. He was one of those who said the things that were supposed to make people laugh before the recorded laughter.
Before trying as an actor, he had made a name for himself as a good baseball player, had started attending university studying journalism and had done a few various jobs, including door-to-door salesman and construction worker.
Despite the name and setting in a Chicago ER, E / R (which lasted only one season and aired on CBS) was not E.R. - Doctors on the front line which aired on NBC for 15 seasons, with Clooney having starred in the first five (for a total of over one hundred episodes) only to be seen again in the last.
Meanwhile, already in the late Eighties and early Nineties he had done a little something in the cinema: for example in 1988 starring in the demented horror The Return of the Killer Tomatoes, a sequel to The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes set a few years after the end of the Great War. del Pomodoro, in a world where tomatoes have been banned, as they are murderers.
But the first roles that are generally cited when talking about Clooney's film career came a little later and are those in One day ... by chance (romantic comedy with Michelle Pfeiffer), Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn (both released in 1996) and especially Batman & Robin, in which Clooney was the first of the two. Even though Batman & Robin did badly - and was criticized for a bat costume that gave the superhero's nipples a little too much prominence - all three movies still helped him get across the idea that it could be so many other things other than. a handsome pediatrician from Chicago.
As the Guardian noted, already in From Dusk Till Dawn we can find a first and very effective example of Clooney acting as a "charming villain" and doing it in a "strangely plausible" way. And as he admitted himself, after realizing that that part was good for him he tried to ride the wave: "I've been a villain in almost every good movie," he said, citing Ocean's Eleven and his two sequels and Michael as an example. Clayton. And to look well in his filmography, there is no shortage - starting with Brother, where are you? - other occurrences of cases of sympathetic criminal, fraudulent Gascon and pocodibuono who in the end gets away with it and knows how to be forgiven and appreciated. One who when Julia Roberts accuses him of being "a thief and a liar" gets away with replying: "I only lied when I said I was not a thief."
But while he is undoubtedly successful, Clooney has often been something else. He has been able to vary and go from Out of Sight (with Jennifer Lopez) to The Thin Red Line (by Terrence Malick), from the drama The Perfect Storm to the children's film Spy Kids, from the geopolitical thriller Syriana to the black humor of Burn After Reading, from the sad In the clouds to the grotesque The man who stares at goats, from Gravity to Ave, Caesar.
Then there are his films as a director, in which at times he plays the protagonist, at other times the sidekick or the supporting actor and at other times he doesn't even act. From 2002 onwards, Clooney has directed a film every three to four years: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck, In Love No Rules, The Ides of March, Monuments Men, Suburbicon and The Midnight Sky, released in 2020. and available on Netflix. Some celebrated, several very crushed by the critics.
Of all his acting films, the one with the highest grossing was Gravity, which exceeded $ 600 million. Of the films he directed, the highest earning was The Monuments Men, which just over $ 150 million. He is well aware of the fact that his directorial films are anything but blockbusters, and he once said: "I can get over it, but I'm surprised they keep making me do them." And he seems to like directing more than acting: "In the end, it's more beautiful to be the painter than to be the painting." With reference to his activity as a producer, in some cases together with his friend Steven Soderbergh, he said: "We have lost money, but it is not the main job we do. I have some money aside and a nice house in Italy, I can manage it ".
Speaking of his doing so many different things, Clooney has won two Oscars: one for Best Supporting Actor in Syriana and another as a producer of Argo, which in 2013 was awarded as Best Film (an award that goes to those who produced it. ). But he was also nominated for lead actor, director and then for the original screenplay for Good Night, and Good Luck and for the non-original screenplay for The Ides of March. Another who had come to be nominated in as many different categories was called Walt Disney.
And speaking of his being quite active even outside the world of cinema, in 2017 the tequila company he had founded a few years earlier with two friends was sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2018, however, he was co-author - together with activist John Prendergast, with him the founder of the non-profit The Sentry - of an article in Foreign Affairs magazine on the fight against corruption in Africa.
Because of the fact that someone thought of him as a possible president of the United States, he happened to say - but it was 2011 - that he had had too many women and used too many drugs to seriously think about them.
Interviewed by the Guardian in late 2020, Clooney said he spent most of the months of the pandemic in his Hollywood home he bought in the 1990s, with his wife and two children. A house with three bedrooms, three covered garages, an office that became a children's room and a tennis court on which, at the time of the interview, his children were practicing with bicycles.
The house in Italy, however, still has it. In a recent video - in which he makes fun of, among other things about his friendship with Brad Pitt (with whom he makes many jokes among other things) - he offered, "as soon as the pandemic ends", a trip to two people on Lake Como, for charity.
