Owen scores again, and again...

In the past six months I've worked with more top directors than any living actor!' Clive Owen beams an absurdly charming smile, laughs out loud and meets my raised eyebrows with a challenge. 'I must have done.'

From the mouths of most actors this would seem like preposterous arrogance. Spoken by the 36-year-old Owen, it's merely the exuberant expression of a man on top of his game, loving his work and, thanks to the surprise - and belated - success of his 1998 film Croupier, finally attracting the big-league opportunities that his talent has long deserved. What's more, as far as the directors are concerned, he's probably right.

Since the Americans turned the intriguing, mesmerising, noirish Croupier into the sleeper hit of 2000, Owen hasn't stopped. He has co-starred with Matt Damon in the thriller The Bourne Identity for Doug Swingers Liman, featured in a typically top-class Robert Altman ensemble for Gosford Park, and played the pivotal character in a series of short films made for BMW by an array of directors that includes Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai and Guy Ritchie.

'That was a mad project,' he says approvingly of BMW's unusual advertising campaign. His co-stars included Mickey Rourke and Madonna and the campaign is currently wooing America. It's all very high-profile stuff for a man still best known for his British television work.

When we meet, however, Owen has something closer to home on his mind. 'Yeah, Croupier has opened up things in America,' he says. 'But for the next few months the only thing that is consuming me is the play.'

And no wonder. A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg will be one of the undoubted must-sees of the autumn. Co-starring Owen and the up-and-coming Victoria Hamilton, it's the first major production of Peter Nichols's ground-breaking black comedy - about a couple whose marriage is crumbling under the strains of raising a disabled child - since it first played in the late Sixties.

'I think Joe Egg is extraordinary,' says the actor, with a passion that doesn't let up for the entire hour we spend chatting in Soho members' club Century. 'When I read it, I was just knocked over. It's shocking that it's never been properly revived since the original production; it's one of those plays that everybody knows or has heard of, but nobody has seen.'

Owen has performed Joe Egg before - in a short run at Islington's King's Head Theatre seven years ago - and has longed to give it a bigger airing. 'I said to my agent, "I don't know what clout I've got in the theatre, but I love this play. See if anyone's interested in putting it on."' The unassuming actor had more clout than he thought, with the New Ambassadors Theatre quickly taking him up on the offer.

Winner of the Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Play in 1967, Joe Egg was described by one critic at the time as 'one of the rare occasions on which audiences can feel the earth moving under their feet'. 'It's as black as comedy gets,' says Owen, 'a combination of being very funny and terribly moving. What will be really exciting - and alarming - is how the play has lost none of its edge. In some cases disability is still a taboo. People's attitudes haven't come that far.'

A working-class Coventry boy, Owen caught the acting bug at school, proceeded to get totally hooked at the city's youth theatre and, after a couple of years on the dole, won a place at RADA.