Jude Law has been proclaimed the sexiest man alive as well as Britain's hottest acting export. But his countryman Clive Owen wipes Law off the screen as his antagonist in Closer, the Mike Nichols film that's been packing in audiences who love frank sexual melodrama or can't get enough of Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman talking dirty.
Because Owen steals this study of yuppie love and infidelity from his costars, he's been winning the mainstream praise and personal accolades that often translate into Hollywood heat. (Pointedly ignoring Law, MSNBC reviewer Dana Kennedy recently burbled to an anchorwoman that Owen in Closer is the handsomest man on the planet.)
More important, Owen has amassed varied credits without thinning out his talent or growing over-exposed. Last weekend he phoned from a London set to promote all his recent films, including I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, his latest movie for Mike Hodges (the British director best known here for his 1972 gangster classic, Get Carter).
"Mike Nichols is one of the best directors around -- one of the most intelligent and charming people you'll ever meet, with incredible experience in both film and theater. But I would put Mike Hodges up there with him."
Owen is now shooting Derailed, an existential thriller co-starring Jennifer Aniston. Set in Chicago, he calls it "a Hitchcockian Kafka nightmare" about a businessman whose life turns upside-down when he misses a commuter train.
At age 40, the actor has made a habit of zigging when people expect him to zag. He's been a mysterious servant from an orphanage in Robert Altman's Gosford Park, an assassin called The Professor in The Bourne Identity, and The Driver in the BMW short-short film series "The Hire" (which has made him a popular favorite to be the post-Pierce Brosnan James Bond).
Owen has a distinctive look and sound. He's a strapping hard-guy version of a Byronic figure -- shadowy, wounded and rebellious -- with a voice that carries the timbre of fur-sheathed iron. But he's proved startlingly versatile. Producer Mike Kaplan recalls that when he first worked on a Clive Owen film, his "impact was so unique that he was compared to the most diverse group of actors ... from Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Bruce Willis to Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Harvey and Robert Ryan." In 2004, American audiences have seen him as a dour nation-builder in King Arthur, a self-loathing gangster in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (just out on DVD) and now the amorous dermatologist in Closer.
