Unlike some of the movie and television sets George Clooney has worked on over the years, the shoot for “The Perfect Storm,” though physically grueling, was harmonious. Clooney’s only disagreement was with the dialect coach, who urged him to adopt a Boston accent for his part as a blue-collar sea captain.
“I said no, the Boston accent is the hardest one to do,” said Clooney, 39, while sitting in his office at his company, Maysville Pictures, on the Warner Brothers lot. “I’m a fairly famous guy, and when you suddenly hear me with a weird accent it’ll take away from everything else.”
Clooney’s character, Capt. Billy Tyne, sounds, he said, “like a guy who could be from anywhere.”
Not embarrassing himself by attempting a tricky accent is just one of many quirky and often savvy decisions Clooney has made throughout his 18-year career in Hollywood. The story of his rocky though successful rise reveals an actor who can be as confrontational as he is affable, as tough as he is thin-skinned, who often really did do it his way.
Clooney worked his way up from “a seventh banana in mediocre TV” to his current asking price of $12 million a film by taking risks and vigorously standing up for himself, even if that assertiveness alienated some powerful people in Hollywood. While he admits to great ambition, Clooney has conducted himself like the anti-Eddie Haskell in an industry fueled by sycophancy. “I’m an actor, but I’m also a businessman and a bit of a hothead,” said Clooney. “This town is run by fear, but I’ve always had a line that I would not cross. It may have cost me some jobs, but at least I can look myself in the eye in the mirror every morning.”
Clooney walked away from his role (as the seamy foreman) on “Roseanne” in 1989 because he felt he wasn’t good in the part, and he quit the 1991 comedy “Baby Talk” after a bitter fight with the executive producer. He was fired from the sitcom “The Facts of Life” in 1986 by the producer after just one season and then reluctantly rehired because he was still under contract. The battles often occurred, he said, when he felt he or a colleague was being mistreated.
His on-set skirmishes didn’t end after he became a film star. As recently as 1998, during the filming of the Gulf War movie “Three Kings,” Clooney said, he came to blows with the director, David O. Russell. “We throttled each other,” said Clooney, who said Russell treated many of the cast and crew badly. “It was a really bad experience.”
Russell agreed. “There were times when I felt like killing George and he felt like killing me,” he said.
Yet for all the directors and producers who have felt Clooney’s wrath, many who have worked with him rhapsodize about him. Wahlberg and Lane said Clooney’s wit and penchant for practical jokes buoyed cast and crew alike during filming.
“He’s the greatest guy in the world,” said Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS, who signed Clooney to a contract when he was head of the Warner Brothers studio in 1990 and helped groom him for stardom. “The minute he walked into my office at Warner Brothers we clicked, and I also knew he was going to be a big star.”
Moonves has maintained a close relationship with Clooney, though he moved to CBS in 1995. Moonves greenlighted the actor’s risky, live, black-and-white remake of “Fail Safe,” which was shown in April. Clooney produced the film and agreed to act in it after Moonves asked him to.
“George is not a vanity producer,” Moonves said. “Every single piece of that project was overseen by George.”
Clooney’s determination was slow to surface. During his youth in Kentucky, where he grew up as the son of a newscaster and a former model, Clooney described himself as “without much focus and drive.” He decided to move to Hollywood to try acting after his cousin, the actor Miguel Ferrer, came to Kentucky to shoot a movie and wangled Clooney a bit part.
His fatherurged his son not to go. “I just felt the odds were stacked against it,” said Nick Clooney, who has been a news anchor in Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles and the host of the American Movie Classics network. Clooney drove to Los Angeles in a beat-up old car in 1982 with $300. That first year, he got parts in commercials and small roles in forgettable television shows like “Riptide.” Clooney joined the cast of a short-lived sitcom called, coincidentally, “ER” in 1984 and then moved to “The Facts of Life” in 1985. He enjoyed his first year, cheerfully calling his performance on the show “the worst combination of overconfidence and bad acting you’ve ever seen in your life.”
In 1991 he was cast in the comedy “Baby Talk” and clashed with its powerful producer, Ed Weinberger, who had also produced “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Taxi.” The parting was so volatile that Clooney worried he might be blacklisted. “It was very dangerous for George to quit `Baby Talk,’ but I told him it was the right thing to do,” Nick Clooney said. Sure enough, Clooney swiftly landed a $40,000-a-week role on the series “Sisters.” But his dream of becoming a film actor — his roles in “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” (1987) and “Horror High” (1988) notwithstanding — eluded him. “I decided to stop thinking of myself as a movie actor working temporarily in TV and just try to do better TV,” Clooney said. “And at that moment, everything changed.”
Not long after, Clooney heard about a pilot for an NBC program called “ER” and lobbied hard for the part of Dr. Doug Ross, even turning down a pilot for a series in which he would have starred. “On paper `ER’ was the much smaller role in an ensemble,” Moonves said. “But he read both scripts and his instinct was `ER’ was better. He’s very smart about material.”
