He's the sharpest card of all

Clive Owen possesses "burning eyes, a sinuous body and dangerous grace". Whether dealing cards, smoking cigarettes or having sex, he's like a "tiger poised to pounce". And that's not just the verdict of the 6.3 million women who tuned in to palpitate as Owen played the eponymous Chancer in the hit 1990s British yuppie drama.

The unlikely audience to buckle, weak-knee'd, before this 35-year-old Coventry boy were, in fact, some rather serious observers of the independent movie scene in the States. And, unlikelier still, the cause of this American critical swoon was a British thriller that few of those female fans back home ever saw.

The movie in question is Croupier. It cost around £3 million to make in 1998, and was more or less binned by FilmFour who considered it a failed attempt to make popular cinema out of sophisticated British material. Even when it picked up business in America, there was no way anyone would bring it back to Britain.

Until, that is, the wily producer, Mike Kaplan, who championed it in the States, successfully circulated the conspiracy theory that it had received no UK release, and was another case of Americans showing the Brits how to appreciate an interesting film. The problem was, in reality, more complicated; it got a poor release here (rather than no release), no poster, and a few poor reviews.

Directed by British stalwart Mike Hodges, Croupier mushroomed in the States, expanding from 17 screens to more than 130 and lasting for over six months. Owen was tipped for an Oscar. He failed to get a nomination, but this may have been because of a technicality. Croupier had, rather incompetently, been given a tiny run in (of all places to be busted) Singapore. The Oscar deadline had been breached. Ouch.

Owen is philosophical about the lost opportunity. After all, Croupier's success as a snowballing "sleeper" film has already opened the floodgates to American offers and produced a newsworthy myth about British incompetence. Three years after the film was made, FilmFour has been forced to shut up and play the game. It's now been re-released here.

"If you talk to anybody in the film community in the US, they all know Croupier, but they don't here," says Owen, biting back his delight. "It's particularly sweet for Mike Hodges, who wasn't treated that well initially, and who had a lot of faith in the film when it seemed no one else around him did. The guy was out there championing his little film on his own. And eventually, when the American reviews came out and said what a gem of a film it was, he was vindicated and justified."

Owen is himself something of a "sleeper" star. He was recently selected as the driver for a series of five BMW films. Available on the internet, these have been directed by heavy hitters Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, John Frankenheimer, Wong Kar-Wai and the newly-hip Mexican director of Amores Perros, Alejandro González Iñárritu. That's a heady CV for a few months work and Owen is now being tipped as the next Bond.

But Owen is as sharp as those burning eyes suggest. Previous low-budget British films he's done, like Stephen Poliakoff's Close My Eyes, and Sean Matthias's Bent, have been marked, above all, by cleverness. And Croupier is an exception only because it also kicked up dust in America.

Owen's character in Croupier is a failed writer, Jack Manfred, who turns to the cards to make a living. He never gambles, just coolly watches the customers, and lives by a refined code of behaviour articulated in the compelling voice-over - an insight into the vulnerable inner world of an otherwise expressionless nobody.