Clive's big chance

If life begins at 40, Clive Owen has got a head start. Before hitting this milestone in October, he's set to reach an even bigger one - finally making the transition from respected British character actor to Hollywood hot property. Already a frontrunner to replace Pierce Brosnan as the next James Bond ('It's all rumour,' he says, 'it's nothing to do with me.'), this working-class lad from Coventry is about to go global. Come the summer, he'll do battle in the title role of the megabudget

As befits an actor who has made his name playing laconic, self-contained characters, Owen - today with fiveo'clock shadow, bleary green eyes and looking as if he's just stumbled out of a casino - has a habit of playing it cool. 'I find it very difficult to get excited,' he says, attempting to smooth out a crease in his crumpled beige linen suit. 'What happens will happen. It would be lovely to be in a film that made serious money, just in terms of what that could open up. For me, success is about choice, really.'

Owen has already tasted the fallout of fame. When he was 24, shortly after graduating from Rada, he won the role of the yuppie wheeler-dealer in the ITV drama Chancer. For a while he was tabloid fodder. Put under scrutiny was his relationship with then girlfriend, now wife, former actress Sarah-Jane Fenton (particularly when they split for a time); the death of his best friend; and, most sensationally, the discovery by one newspaper of his estranged father, a Country & Western singer who walked out on the family when Owen was three. It's little wonder when you meet him that he has an air of detachment about him - until he warms to you.

'I was very wary to begin with and very thrown by it all,' he recalls. 'But I've had a lot of experience now. Some actors get off on all that, and some actors don't. For me it's all about the work, and the rest of it you just have to deal with. I used to moan about it, but you can't get into acting and then moan about the stuff that comes with it. So I'm much more adept at dealing with it now - but that doesn't necessarily mean I enjoy it any more.'

After Chancer, Owen went low-key, deconstructing his pin-up image in the process with the incest drama Close My Eyes, then playing a Jewish homosexual in the Nazi concentration-camp story Bent. It was only by accident that he was thrust into the limelight again. After a one-screen release in the UK,

Croupier - which saw him play an undercover writer - surprisingly took $6 million in the US. 'It was a big turning point in my career,' admits Owen, who was soon recruited as an assassin for the espionage thriller The Bourne Identity and as butler for Robert Altman's celebrated murder-mystery Gosford Park.

But you can't accuse Owen of selling out and forgetting his roots. His latest film, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, is a London underworld thriller that reunites him with Croupier's director, Mike Hodges. With the premise bearing an uncanny resemblance to Hodges's 1971 classic, Get Carter, Owen plays Will Graham, a former hard man living in rural isolation, until the death of his brother brings him back to the capital to face his former employers. 'I always treated it as a study of somebody who was violent and tried to get out and tries to resist becoming violent again,' says Owen. 'That's, very simply, his journey through the movie. He's trying very hard not to go there - and the film is about him being slowly pulled towards doing something he doesn't want to do.'

The film, with its pared-down violence and dialogue, is perfectly tailored to Owen's talents. With his minimalist acting style (Hodges says he is 'the most precise actor I've worked with since [Get Carter star] Michael Caine'), Owen has a rough-hewn, tough-guy weight to him, like a latter-day Lee Marvin. Although he's modest about his allure - 'If I went around thinking I were a sex symbol, I'd be on very dodgy ground' - compared with other British actors of his generation, fops or pretty boys such as Hugh Grant or Jude Law, Owen outguns them all.

In Hollywood, only Russell Crowe does it better - and this may change when audiences see Owen in King Arthur. Produced by Tinseltown top gun Jerry Bruckheimer, who also recruited his Pirates Of The Caribbean star Keira Knightley to play Guinevere, anticipation surrounding the project is white-hot. Owen believes the film proves that he's no reluctant star. 'You don't do a f***ing $100 million Jerry Bruckheimer film if you don't want the attention,' he says with disdain.

Even as a boy, Owen - the third of five sons, he was raised by his mother and stepfather - has always wormed his way into iconic roles. He fell in love with acting after playing the Artful Dodger in a school production of Oliver! 'Never did anything else,' he grunts. 'Couldn't do anything else.' A selfproclaimed 'arrogant little f***er', he turned down a chance to go to the Mountview Theatre School in Crouch End and spent two desperate years on the dole. 'It was the early Eighties, and there was a lot of unemployment, especially where I came from in Coventry,' he recalls. After days spent eating chips and sleeping, he pulled himself together, applied for Rada and got in. The turning point came when, in his final year, he was called on to replace an ill Gary Oldman in a new Howard Barker play at the Royal Court, having studied the role in class.