La data di nascita artistica di George Clooney risale al 1994. Il dottor Ross, pediatra di grande professionalità ma anche cacciatore di gonnelle di prima categoria, è il personaggio che attrae subito l'attenzione del pubblico femminile di E.R. la fortunata serie televisiva prodotta da Steven Spielberg e scritta da Michael Crichton. Il rischio, con un esordio di questo genere (a parte piccole apparizioni in altre opere televisive) è quello di rimanere confinati a vita dentro il piccolo schermo. Invece non è così, sfruttando un fascino 'alla Cary Grant' George si lancia sul grande schermo non abbandonando però E.R. e, intelligentemente, non pretendendo dilatazioni del proprio ruolo. Da subito decide di misurarsi con ruoli diversi. Se in Dal tramonto all'alba interpreta Seth Gecko, un fuorilegge "on the road" che può permettersi di affermare: "Sono un bastardo, ma non così bastardo", subito dopo si propone come padre separato con figlioletta da accudire in Un giorno...per caso duettando alla grande con una Michelle Pfeiffer pronta a condividere con lui il piacere di una commedia ben scritta. Dopo l'infortunio di Batman Robin, per il quale si vanta di aver definitivamente affossato il personaggio dell'uomo pipistrello, recupera credibilità in divisa militare. Sicuramente in quella di Thomas Devoe di The Peacemaker, ma soprattutto nel ruolo cameo di La sottile linea rossa di Terrence Malick in cui, in poche battute, disegna il ritratto del tipico militare retorico e ottuso. Il suo sorriso ironico e l'aria scanzonata non lo lasciano mai e gli permettono di sostenere un film deboluccio come Out of Sight. Ma il fascino della divisa deve contare se lo ritroviamo in Three Kingsa giocare, senza sbagliare un colpo, tra commedia grottesca e dramma. Come dice di solito: "Non voglio arrivare a 65 anni ed essere ancora preoccupato di come mi può giudicare un responsabile del casting". In realtà non corre di questi rischi. Il 2003 è stato un anno ottimo e pieno di successi per George: interprete del remake del capolavoro di fantascienza Solaris, dove ha potuto mettere ancora una volta in luce le sue doti di attore drammatico, si è ripetuto con Confessioni di una mente pericolosa, col quale ha debuttato con successo alla regia, riscuotendo consensi soprattutto da parte della critica. Infine, attivo come non mai, si è divertito a gigioneggiare nella commedia Prima ti sposo, poi ti rovino, nel ruolo di un cinico divorzista, tornando a lavorare con i fratelli Coen, che già ne avevano messo in luce le spiccate doti brillanti (Fratello, dove sei?).

Scapolo americano (Kentucky) di 43 anni, bello e simpatico, figura esemplare di giovanotto elegante alla Cary Grant anche di canaglia seducente alla Frank Sinatra, intelligente, fortunato, sorriso magnifico, occhi carezzevoli, aria ironica, George Clooney s’annoia. Si stufa. Non sa più da quale nuova parte voltarsi.
Con successo, hafatto l’attore in una ventina di film: bene nelle parti drammatiche (Batman & Robin), benissimo in quelle divertenti (Spy Kids, La scuoIa degIi orrori, Dal tramonto all’alba, Fratello, dove sei?). Con successo, ha fatto il regista Confessioni di una mente pericolosa ha avuto critica e premi ottimi. Con successo, ha fatto il produttore: la sua società Section Eight aveva già realizzato 23 tra film e progetti televisivi prima del successo di Ocean’s Eleven. Con successo ha interpretato spot pubblicitari rimasti proverbiali. Con poco successo una volta si è sposato: con Talia Balsam, divorziando dopo tre anni e promettendo di non farlo più. Con successo, è diventato proprietario: comprando in Italia la settecentesca Villa Oleandraa Laglio sul lago di Como, dove invita tutti quelli che gli sono simpatici ma ospita in realtà pochissimi amici. Se il seguito Ocean’s Twelve, realizzato in velocità e senza passione, a molti è parso sciatto, lo aspetta adesso un lavoro più impegnativo: Good Night and Good Luck (Buonanotte e buona fortuna), un film per la Warner Bros sul conduttore televisivo americano Edward R. Murrow e la sua battaglia, negli anni Cinquanta della «caccia alle streghe», la persecutoria campagna anticomunista del senatore McCarthy.

Ma lui si annoia: come variare l’andamento della sua carriera, della sua vita? Cos’altro potrebbe fare? Quello che fa, sempre meglio. Sono pochi i divi dotati di un fascino così immediato, d’una qualità che è più della bellezza, è simpatia, complicità, calore, capacità di legame con le persone. Un fatto di famiglia? È figlio dei produttore e conduttore televisivo Nick Clooney, nipote della cantante Rosemary Clooney, cugino di attori, appassionato di golf e baseball (in particolare del Cincinnati Kids). All’Università ha studiato giornalismo,a recitare ha cominciato per caso, senza soldi, dividendo la stanza con Charlie Sheen per risparmiare. Il primo successo rimane ancora memorabile per il grande pubblico televisivo:
FR/Medici in prima linea, dove interpretava Doug Ross, pediatra bravo e affascinante. Il primo timore è quello che lo spinge ad abitare lontano dalla California ha paura dei terremoti.
Da Lo Specchio 9 gennaio 2004

Ai bei vecchi tempi del vecchio Milke fu Umberto Eco a immortalarne il profilo e l'essenza in Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno. Più genericamente, il fenoméno divismo è sempre stato studiato da sociologi e massmediologi del livello di Edgar Morin. Nessuno stupore, dunque, se una rivista che si vuole estremamente sofisticata come il New Yorker, sotto la rubrica Profiles, nel numero del 14 aprile dedica un servizio di Ian Parker lungo dieci pagine (senza illustrazioni, salvo le tradizionali, magnifiche vignette, e una grande foto a colorí non particolarmente lusinghiera, firmata Martin Schoeller), a George Clooney. Sottotitolo: La fatica dietro lo charme senza fatica di George Clooney.

Onestamente, si è letto di meglio. A proposito di Clooney e a proposito di quel fenomeno strano che chiamiamo star. Eppure, il fatto che un attore (e più recentemente regista), ancora vivo e vegeto, conquisti lo spazio normalmente concesso ai premi Nobel, ai premi Pulitzer o ai laureati vari di alte discipline dice qualcosa a proposito del personaggio che Clooney è diventato, al di là delle sue qualità di interprete (sulle quali ancora di discute) e di regista, che a me personalmente sembrano innegabili, ma forse perché nei suoi due primi film ha trattato temi e situazioni che mi appassionano particolarmente.
Dal «profilo» tracciato da Parker, che come molti big della stampa americana ha avuto il privilegio di passare con il suo «oggetto» molto tempo, fuori dalle costrizioni delle conferenze stampa e delle interviste in venti minuti, esce in effetti un uomo molto simpatico, intelligente e curioso, con un principale progetto in testa: piacere, ed essere e comportarsi come un essere qualunque, vedere gli amici di sempre, fare barbecue la domenica, ignorare le insinuazioni sgradevoli, amare una ragazza anche se non è una celebrità, spendersi, con la sua famiglia (padre incluso, l'ex star tv Nick Clooney) per le cause che gli stanno a cuore.
L'unica cosa che non gli riesce bene? A sentire Ian Parker, è far funzionare la celebre macchïnetta per il caffè di cui è testimonial. Troppo bello per essere vero.
Da Il Venerdì di Repubblica, 1 maggio 2008

THERE'S no mystery, none at all, about why George Clooney is a movie star. Guys who are extremely handsome, move well, can project intelligence and humor, appear to enjoy the company of women and possess soft, deep masculine voices have historically done pretty nicely for themselves on the silver screen.
Mr. Clooney, in fact, often seems like a throwback to the leading men of earlier eras: a passing resemblance to Cary Grant, especially when he deploys his wry half-smile; a hint of Paul Newman's '60s cool. He's the kind of actor who could float along forever on his genial presence alone, coast on charm. But he doesn't. (Or doesn't always.) That's the mystery.
His performance in Jason Reitman's "Up in the Air" has put him in early contention for this year's best actor Oscar, and a more effective showcase for his skills would be tough to imagine. Playing an Omaha business consultant named Ryan Bingham, who flies around the country firing people for a living (but with a gentle touch) and occasionally delivers motivational speeches in which he advises his listeners to shed the burdens of responsibility, Mr. Clooney appears in every scene and exudes all-American confidence. Dressed in impeccably cut suits and wheeling his carry-on bag with the deftness of a seasoned pro, he glides through airports and chain hotels as if he owned them, as in a sense he does.
Ryan is on the road, we're told, for more than 300 days a year, and these impersonal places are — by choice — his true home. Instead of family photos, his wallet is filled with cards proclaiming his membership in the elite clubs reserved for the highest-volume business travelers, badges of identity supplied by airlines, hotels, car-rental agencies. It doesn't seem like much of a life, but it suits him down to the ground. (So to speak.) The big nowhere is his comfort zone.

What makes "Up in the Air" an ideal vehicle for Mr. Clooney is that everything he has to do in the film is just the smallest shade of difference away from his familiar amiable persona. Movie-star performing is a peculiar, poorly understood subset of the art of acting: it relies on a certain constancy of personality, on the ability to seem at all times as if you were simply playing yourself and to give the audience the illusion that they, somehow, know you — you the person, not just you the character.
For actors like Mr. Clooney, who work without the benefit of wigs and false noses and exotic accents, the line between self and character can be mighty thin. In the olden days — i.e., the studio era, when all but the most ornery contract players made several films a year and did what their bosses told them — popular actors were deliberately confined to a fairly narrow range of parts: typecast, so that moviegoers would always get more or less what they expected when they plunked down their two bits for a Cagney gangster picture, say, or a Gary Cooper western.
Successful actors have a lot more power now. If they choose to, they can typecast themselves — as action heroes, for example, or romantic-comedy leading men. Early in his film career, after the television series "ER" had made him an official hot property, Mr. Clooney toyed with some of the more conventional types: as a romantic comedian, opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, in the pleasant but inconsequential "One Fine Day" (1996); as a stolid, Harrison Ford-like man of action, in uniform, in the dull "Peacemaker" (1997); and even, God help him, as a comic-book superhero, in the catastrophic "Batman & Robin" (1997).
When he finally found a role in which he looked entirely at ease, it was in a film that was neither a standard-issue piece of studio entertainment nor quite an offbeat indie, but something in between: Steven Soderbergh's tricky comic caper movie "Out of Sight" (1998), based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, and with all the noirish eccentricity that implies. Mr. Leonard's skewed world, in which competence, wit and unfussy romance are highly prized — and constantly endangered, because there are always way too many thugs and morons about — turns out to be an environment in which Mr. Clooney (if not his character) can thrive.
His performance is all sly looks and bone-dry readings, held together by a general air of barely contained exasperation at the antics of the fools and knaves who surround him. And although he's a thief and an escaped convict, he looks with undisguised admiration at the United States marshal who's trying to bring him to justice: she knows her job, and she's Jennifer Lopez besides.
His style in "Out of Sight" is too elusive, too stylized — it's like lowlife Restoration comedy — to serve as a repeatable, bankable star persona, but it's the foundation, in a way, for everything good he's done since then, the theme on which he works his small, increasingly subtle variations. The larcenous gulf war soldier he plays in David O. Russell's inventive "Three Kings" (1999) is a tougher, slightly bitterer version of his "Out of Sight" character, and it fits.
And Danny Ocean, the suave criminal he has played in Mr. Soderbergh's neo-Rat Pack heist comedies "Ocean's Eleven" (2001), "Ocean's Twelve" (2004) and "Ocean's Thirteen" (2007), is the blither, cooler model, with better clothes and better luck. But the Ocean movies, which are among the few box-office hits Mr. Clooney has had, are really the only occasions in the past decade in which he has indulged in purely personality-based acting, allowed himself the luxury of movie-star nonchalance. (And he still manages to break more of a sweat than Frank Sinatra did in the original 1960 "Ocean's Eleven.")
He hasn't typecast himself, really. It's fairer to say that he has chosen his roles with an extremely canny awareness of his range, which doesn't extend to the more outré regions of human behavior. (We have Johnny Depp and Daniel Day-Lewis for that.) Even his nutty comic turns in the Coen brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000) and "Burn After Reading" (2008) are relatively restrained, especially compared with the out-there performing styles of his fellow cast members.
You wouldn't want to see him as Richard III, and he's smart enough not to try. He works the territory of 21st-century American normality, playing — now, at 48 — middle-aged men who are good at what they do and getting by, for the moment, but are beginning to feel stirrings of doubt and dread. These days there are quite a few of those guys around, and they aren't all the same guy either. Ryan Bingham is one of them, of course, but his slow-dawning suspicion that traveling light might not be all there is to life is a different order of dissatisfaction from the mortal panic felt by Bob Barnes, the C.I.A. field operative Mr. Clooney plays in Stephen Gaghan's 2005 "Syriana."
In that film he strays about as far from recognizability as he ever has — though it's not, in truth, that far. He's chunkier than usual, more rumpled, wearier-looking, and he sports a beard that he appears not to pay a lot of attention to: the beard of a man who has spent too much time chasing terrorists in the brutal heat and tumult of the Middle East and can't be bothered to shave. He's disguised just enough, it seems, for the academy to notice that he's acting: he won a supporting actor Oscar for the performance.
Whenever an actor as nuanced and unostentatious as Mr. Clooney receives an Academy Award, it's a bit of a shock, because the academy tends to favor gaudier, more obviously strenuous stuff: the big, sloppy emotions Mr. Clooney doesn't traffic in. (If he's nominated, the best-actor race could be particularly interesting, because another likely frontrunner, Jeff Bridges of "Crazy Heart," is that sort of actor too.)
Being a movie star has its creative pitfalls, chief among them narcissism and laziness. If all you have to do is play your own wonderful self, you needn't expend much time or energy trying to bring a character to screen life — a unique human being with specific, maybe interesting, quirks and problems. You fall for your own self-created illusion. But if an actor can avoid that trap, there are serious benefits to movie stardom too, and Mr. Clooney seems to know how to exploit the advantage his good looks and charm have given him. The unfair fact is that his kind of appeal can be a fast track to character, like one of those express lines frequent fliers enjoy.
Movie stars don't have to work for the audience's attention; they've got it as soon as they appear on screen, and once they have it, they can, if they have the inclination and the chops, go about their proper business of exploring behavior in its minutest, most unpredictable particulars. That's what George Clooney does in "Up in the Air," while seeming only to be himself.
And it's what he did in his first best-actor-nominated performance a couple of years ago, as the title character in Tony Gilroy's dark corporate thriller "Michael Clayton" (2007). In that movie Mr. Clooney plays a depressed and disappointed man: an ex-cop who fixes messy situations for a giant New York law firm and never lets his ambivalence show. Never, that is, until the very end, when, after some unsatisfying, compromised version of justice has been achieved through Clayton's efforts, he allows himself to relax a little at last.
He flags a taxi, slumps into the back seat and tells the cabbie to drive, and it's only then that you understand how eloquent Mr. Clooney's body language has been throughout the preceding two hours — how tensely he's been holding himself, how warily he's been sizing up his dangerous world. As he sits in the cab, just riding, the camera stays on him for two full minutes. He does nothing, apparently. His expression hardly changes. But you can feel the weight of what he's been through in his blankness, his emptied-out eyes. You can't stop looking at him. It's a great, daring piece of acting. Only a movie star could get away with it.
Da The New York Times, 10 gennaio 2010

SUCH a deep streak of nostalgia runs through George Clooney’s career that he seems to be working his way through every decade of the 20th century.
In “Leatherheads,” a romantic comedy he has directed and appears in (opening in April), he is a 1920s professional football player who competes with a younger star player (John Krasinski) for the love of a suspicious journalist (Renée Zellweger). He has entered the Depression ’30s in the Coen brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” the wartime ’40s in Steven Soderbergh’s “Good German” and the McCarthy ’50s in “Good Night, and Good Luck” (which earned him Oscar nominations for directing and writing). His first film as director, the clever “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” spans the ’60s through the ’80s as it follows Chuck Barris’s tall tale about being a C.I.A. assassin in his spare time from “The Gong Show.”
And that’s not counting projects that simply evoke earlier days. “Intolerable Cruelty” is an updated screwball comedy, and “Ocean’s Eleven” and its sequels are tributes to Rat Pack Vegas. Even his current legal drama, “Michael Clayton,” is frequently said to recall ’70s political thrillers. Does this guy not want to live in the present?
As he sees things, it was not nostalgia but a search for strong, unusual material that led him to the past. “I think we all have these ideas: The world was better then, clearer, easier,” but making so many period films “wasn’t in any way a conscious thing,” he said. “I did some contemporary pieces that weren’t very good,” then started making different choices.
It’s true that his affection for the past, as it emerged in a recent telephone conversation, seems less about longing for some glorified bygone era than about being enamored of its films. A thread running through his conversation is that they don’t make movies like they used to — smart, surprising, ambiguous — and should. That attitude partly explains why he is so often pegged as today’s Cary Grant. (“Are you tired of hearing that?” I asked. “Cary Grant must be tired of it,” he answered.)

Oddly enough, though, his strongest performances are firmly set in the present, and shaped by political or social urgency. He won his Oscar as best supporting actor for playing a C.I.A. operative undermined by his bosses in “Syriana” (2005), about the tangle of American foreign policy and oil. And in “Michael Clayton” he gives what may be his most enduring, sophisticated performance yet, as a lawyer whose scruples have been eroded and whose life is falling apart.
What truly distinguishes him is not his retro-Hollywood stardom or the high-profile activism that has taken him to Darfur and the United Nations, but their unlikely combination, his ability to raise a question with an old-fashioned ring — “What’s the right thing to do?” — and apply it to issues that are totally of the moment.
The trick is to manage that without coming off as a sanctimonious publicity hound. Off screen some strategic modesty helps. On screen he avoids preachiness because his films don’t pretend to answer tough moral questions; they simply insist the questions are worth asking.
“Michael Clayton” asks plenty. The film may technically be a legal thriller, with Mr. Clooney as a lawyer whose firm is defending the wrong side in a class-action suit. Essentially, though, it is a moral thriller. His character is a fixer for the firm, a lawyer whose role is to clean up messes quietly, using whatever shady tactics the job requires. When his friend, a partner in the firm (Tom Wilkinson), goes off his medication and manically threatens to reveal damning evidence against their own clients, Clayton faces the ugliness of his own compromised career.
Beyond that bare-bones story, the movie is subtle and character driven. Clayton is a man who should have had the world at his feet. He’s smart and ambitious. He looks like George Clooney. Instead his world is crumbling under him: He’s a divorced father who will never have enough time with his young son; he is bankrupt, thanks to a bar he bought with his ne’er-do-well brother; he has a gambling problem. Mr. Clooney makes you feel in every frame that Clayton himself is sick to death of this tawdry life — which doesn’t mean he’ll change it.
If an unattractive actor plays a loser, you don’t necessarily stop to wonder why he’s a failure. George Clooney as a man struggling to stay afloat makes you ask: How did that happen? Tony Gilroy, who wrote and directed the film (his first as director, although he is a co-writer of the “Bourne” movies), used Mr. Clooney’s looks shrewdly, to suggest the character’s immense, lost possibilities.
“All those things are writ large on George: all that charm, all that quickness and easiness,” Mr. Gilroy said. “It gave a tragic dimension that wouldn’t be there with anyone else, with someone like Karl Malden in the role.”
“Michael Clayton” hands Mr. Clooney two big Oscar-bait speeches, and he makes the most of them without going over the edge into scenery chewing. In the more nuanced, he confronts Mr. Wilkinson’s character, having tracked him down to protect him. As the scene builds from patient persuasion to fierce exasperation and anger, Mr. Clooney illuminates every turn of Clayton’s thoughts. In the more calculated, climactic scene, he confronts Tilda Swinton’s character, a lawyer who is beyond devious; while ripping her apart, he is unsparing as he lists his own ethical lapses.
But Mr. Clooney’s finest scene is one in which he has no dialogue at all. Having been called away from a poker game to clean up yet another mess — a hit-and-run in which the firm’s client has left the scene — he gets out of his car on the drive back from the client’s house and walks into a field. It is near dawn on a frigid morning, he sees horses in the distance, and as he stares at this landscape of pristine beauty, the entire burden of Michael Clayton’s life and conscience becomes visible on Mr. Clooney’s face.
The scene plays twice in the film: once near the beginning, just before the story flashes back to events set off four days earlier, and again near the end, when that story comes full circle. The first time you see the pain and sadness; the second time you understand where it comes from. But from the start there is no doubt that this man is weary, soul-sick and troubled about what to do.
Then his car explodes in a fireball behind him; this isn’t some philosophical treatise. “Michael Clayton” is a taut drama, the kind that makes it easy to invoke ’70s touchstones like “The Parallax View.” In their published interviews, Mr. Clooney and Mr. Gilroy have talked about their first meeting, in which Mr. Clooney’s reluctance to work with a first-time director was overcome, partly because of their shared enthusiasm for those classics. The ’70s tag has become to “Michael Clayton” what Cary Grant is to George Clooney: a lazy but plausible label.
Mr. Clooney plays down their bonding over the ’70s. “Every director you’ll ever meet will sit down and quote those films,” he said, before sounding nostalgic for them again. “The truth of the matter is that nobody makes films like that anymore,” and Mr. Gilroy “shot it with that kind of discipline.”
While criticizing the bland movies of today, he wryly (and with smart self-deprecation) included some of his own too-predictable work. “The Peacemaker,” the 1997 thriller in which he and Nicole Kidman try to save New York from a nuclear bomb, “had an element that could have worked, but it became more of an action film,” he said. It was the first movie released by DreamWorks and “It got studio-ized by a brand new studio.” (The stars are well matched in one way: They both look uncomfortable.)
About “One Fine Day,” the 1996 romantic comedy in which he and Michelle Pfeiffer play workaholic single parents, he said, “Once you start that film, you know where it’s ending.” (He’s right, although it has its charms.)
After experiences like that, he told himself: “I’ve done these now. They’re exactly what they are. I have to rethink what I’m doing. The next big film I did was ‘The Perfect Storm.’ At least everybody dies at the end.”
He began to branch out into less comfortable territory, including the Coen brothers’ films. His broad performance as an escaped convict in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) suits the movie’s stylized approach, although the portrayal is essentially about maintaining a bug-eyed look. He is affecting as a widower on a space station who sees images of his dead wife in “Solaris” (2002), a Soderbergh film that made no money.
“Solaris” is set in the future instead of the past, but it’s still not today. And today is where you find those intense, morally troubled characters like Michael Clayton and Bob Barnes in “Syriana.” The scene in which he is tortured was the Oscar bait, but the performance is more layered than that.
Mr. Clooney plays Barnes as a man uncomfortable in his skin. It’s not just the beard and extra 35 pounds; there’s the lumbering walk, the guarded look on his face. He’s a suspicious guy who’s not afraid to give his bosses news they don’t want to hear.
Campaigning for awards for “Michael Clayton” (he has already won a slew from critics groups) is much easier than his last Oscar go-round, when he was promoting both “Syriana” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” Mr. Clooney said. Unlike some stars, he admits he’s in a campaign. That directness takes the curse off, just as his efforts to stop the genocide in Darfur come wrapped in modesty. His mantra is that he is not a policymaker but someone who can raise awareness by getting cameras to follow him.
“Two films, three different categories, there was so much — cocktail parties and kissing babies, it got to be embarrassing,” he said of the last campaign. “You wonder: Am I really helping the movie? Or am I just as self-serving as I could possibly be?” Now, that is the comment of a star who knows how to handle and spin fame in the 21st century, a job that was easier way back when.
Da The New York Times, 6 gennaio 2008

Il premio Oscar George Clooney ha esordito come attore, per diventare quindi produttore, produttore esecutivo, sceneggiatore e infine regista.
Figlio di un giornalista televisivo, Clooney è un grande sostenitore del primo Emendamento ed è profondamente dedito alle cause umanitarie.
Nel 2006, Clooney ha ricevuto tre nomination all’Oscar: per la Migliore Regia e la Migliore Sceneggiatura Originale per Good Night, and Good Luck e come Migliore Attore Non Protagonista per Syriana. E’ stata la prima volta nella storia dell’Academy in cui un artista ha ricevuto nomination sia per la regia che per la recitazione, per due film diversi. Clooney ha vinto l’Oscar come Migliore Attore Non Protagonista per Syriana, di cui è stato anche produttore esecutivo.
Uno dei film più apprezzati del 2007 è stato Michael Clayton, della Warner Bros, in cui Clooney deve svolgere il lavoro sporco per conto di una società legale, e a un certo punto dovrà compiere una difficile scelta di vita e di carriera.

In amore niente regole è il primo film prodotto dalla Smokehouse, la società di produzione recentemente fondata da Clooney e dal suo socio Grant Heslov. Clooney ha da poco ultimato la produzione della dark comedy Burn After Reading, che lo vedrà nuovamente al fianco dei Fratelli Coen. Inoltre la Smokehouse ha in cantiere la produzione di The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, tratto dal romanzo di John Grisham.
Heslov e Clooney hanno lavorato insieme alla Section Eight, una società in cui Clooney collaborava con Steven Soderbergh. Section Eight ha prodotto diversi film fra cui Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen, Michael Clayton, The Good German (Intrigo a Berlino), Good Night, and Good Luck., Syriana, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (Confessioni di una mente pericolosa), The Jacket, Full Frontal e Welcome to Collinwood.
Clooney è stato produttore esecutivo della divisione televisiva di Section Eight, per cui ha anche diretto cinque puntate di Unscripted, un reality show in onda su HBO. E’ stato produttore esecutivo e cameraman di K Street, sempre per HBO.
Clooney ha debuttato nella regia nel 2002 con Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (Confessioni di una mente pericolosa) per la Miramax, vincendo il Premio Speciale della National Board of Review.
Nel 2005 Clooney è stato candidato all’Oscar per la scrittura e la regia del suo secondo progetto di regia, Good Night, and Good Luck. Il film gli è valso numerosi riconoscimenti: il Paul Selvin Award del Writers Guild of America, il Freedom Award della Broadcast Film Critics Association. Oltre alle due nomination all’ Oscar, il film è valso a Clooney le nomination a due Golden Globe, a due BAFTA, a un SAG Award, a un Independent Spirit Award, a due Critics’ Choice Awards, al WGA Award e al DGA Award.
Quello stesso anno, Clooney ha interpretato e coprodotto Syriana per la Warner Bros. Il film gli è valso premi internazionali fra cui un Oscar e un Golden Globe per il suo ruolo di sostegno nel film. E’ stato inoltre nominato al SAG, al BAFTA, al Critics’ Choice Award per la sua performance.
Nel 2006 Clooney ha ricevuto l’American Cinematheque Award e il Modern Master Award da parte del Santa Barbara Film Festival.
Clooney è stato inoltre protagonista della serie Ocean’s (della Warner Bros.) e del film dei Fratelli Coen O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Fratello dove sei? della Disney), che gli ha meritato un Golden Globe Award come Migliore Attore. Ha ricevuto elogi da parte della critica per l’apprezzato film drammatico Three Kings (Warner Bros.) e per il film nominato all’Oscar Out of Sight (Universal). Altri suoi film comprendono: Intolerable Cruelty (Prima ti sposo, poi ti rovino - Universal), Solaris (FOX), The Peacemaker (Il conciliatore, DreamWorks), Batman & Robin (Warner Bros.), One Fine Day (20th Century Fox) e From Dusk Till Dawn (Dal tramonto all’alba, Miramax).
E’ stato il protagonista di diverse serie TV ma deve la sua popolarità soprattutto al ruolo del Dott. Douglas Ross, nella serie drammatica della NBC ER, che gli ha meritato nomination al Golden Globe, allo Screen Actors Guild, al People’s Choice e all’Emmy.
Clooney è stato produttore esecutivo e coprotagonista della trasmissione in diretta televisiva Fail Safe, un telefilm premiato con l’Emmy e sviluppato attraverso la sua Maysville Pictures. Fail Safe è stato nominato al Golden Globe Award 2000 come Best Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. Il film era basato sull’omonimo romanzo dei primi anni ‘60.
Nel 2006, Clooney e suo padre Nick si sono recati nel Darfur per girare il documentario Journey to Darfur, un lavoro che Clooney ha recentemente presentato al Consiglio di Sicurezza dell’ONU. E’ stato inoltre la voce narrante del documentario sul Darfur Sand and Sorrow.
Nel 2007, Clooney, insieme a Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle e Jerry Weintraub, ha cofondato Not On Our Watch, un’organizzazione la cui missione è attrarre l’attenzione e le risorse globali per fermare e prevenire le atrocità perpetrate sulla popolazione del Darfur.
Fra i diversi riconoscimenti ottenuti per i suoi sforzi umanitari nel Darfur, ricordiamo il Peace Summit Award 2007, consegnato durante l’8° summit mondiale del Nobel Peace Laureates a Roma, presenziato dal sindaco Walter Veltroni, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev e dal Dalai Lama.
Clooney è inoltre un sostenitore delle automobili non tradizionali, infatti possiede due macchine elettriche e un’automobile ibrida.