THE FANTASTIC MR CLOONEY

At 46, grey-haired George Clooney, twice voted the Sexiest Man Alive, still tops the list of Hollywood stars women would ditch their husbands for, but will a new (and much younger) girlfriend change all that? Lydia Bell finds out

George Clooney’s pulling power knows no bounds. He can hobble along on crutches, puff away on cigarettes for a movie, pull pranks on co-stars, appear in black and white or colour, on Roseanne or ER, rob casinos, grow a long, grey beard, rub shoulders with Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or speak out about the crisis in Darfur. As far as the ladies are concerned, George is still the one.

Part of the attraction in the past may have been the allure of the unattainable man – he famously confessed to American TV personality Barbara Walters that he was determined never to walk down the aisle again, after a four-year marriage ended in 1993. He would, he said, remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfieffer both thought that was laughable, and bet the actor £10,000 that he would be married and have a family by the age of 40. Kidman paid up on his 40th birthday, but Clooney returned the cheque, betting double or nothing that he would still be single and childless by 50.

But the actor now insists that he didn’t really mean what he said to Walters. “I’ve been paying for that interview ever since,” he says. “It was a conversation that probably shouldn’t have taken place when it did, because the truth is that I’m really not planning on being a bachelor the rest of my life. When I said it, I just happened to have gotten through a divorce and thought, ‘I don’t want to do this ever again’.” These days, he has a girlfriend, Sarah Larson, a 28-year-old waitress before she quit her job to travel the world with Clooney. The pair were injured in a car accident in New Jersey last September, when a car hit his motorcycle, bringing their relationship into the public eye. They appeared at the Michael Clayton premiere a few days after the accident, in high spirits, despite Lawson being on crutches.

He has never really had a plan for his personal life, he says. “I really don’t know what I see myself doing. You know, the funniest thing is that everything that I saw myself doing 10 years ago, I’m not doing. So, you can’t really plan it out. You just kind of live.”

His main obsession, he says, has never been women, but his career: “I’ve been so focused on work for the last couple of years, I’ve barely been up for air. Directing did a lot for me, and then, the other films that I’ve been in, it’s just been a pure, screaming run to the finish line.”

Clooney, who started out as a doctor on ER, found Hollywood success in movies such as Batman & Robin, the Cohen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Gulf thriller Three Kings and the Oceans Eleven caper films. And he has lately balanced his big-budget Hollywood blockbusters with a growing career as a producer and director, making his directorial debut in 2002 with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which didn’t enjoy much box-office success but was respected by critics. In recent years, he has chosen to act in less mainstream films. In 2005, the year he starred in Syriana, on oil-corruption thriller based on the memoirs of a CIA agent in the Middle East, he also directed, produced and starred in Good Night and Good Luck, a film about a 1950s journalist’s war with senator John McCarthy – for which he received an Oscar nomination.

His latest film (showing onboard now) is Michael Clayton, the study of a man who comes to realise he has lost his moral backbone by working as a fixer for a big New York law firm. He was directed by Tony Gilroy, a first-time director who screenwrote the Bourne Identity trilogy. Having already won an Oscar, Clooney says he felt he could make his own creative choices, and not feel bound to struggle for commercial success any longer.

Clooney took a huge pay cut for this role, but, as he says, he makes films for the love of it these days. “It’s not like you’re going to get rich off The Good German or Good Night and Good Luck or Syriana,” he says. “The truth of the matter is that it’s really hard to find a good script in Hollywood. You’d think it’d be easy, but it isn’t. The film was a case of ‘this movie’s got to be made’.”

Despite being renowned for his social conscience, he didn’t choose Michael Clayton “because it was a message film”. Instead, he was interested in the characters: “flawed individuals looking for redemption.” Although corporate America, shady secrets and whistle-blowers do make for “interesting storytelling”, he admits.

A self-described liberal, he refers to his political and social activism – he is outspoken against the Bush government and the humanitarian crisis in Darfur – as “that whole other side of my life”. He feels the need to get involved because of his family background, he says. “My mother was a mayor, my father ran for Congress, so I’ve always been involved, politically and socially, in issues.”

However, this part of his life is separate from his acting and movie-making. He doesn’t feel tempted to make overtly political films. “Usually, you find that preachy movies about anything can be too strident,” he says. “If you’re going to do that, then do a documentary. If you’re going to do a film to make entertainment, do a City Of God, which was a wonderful film. Find a way to make it entertaining.”

You get the impression that Clooney is distinctly unimpressed by the notion of celebrity because it detracts from the art of acting. “People are so obsessed by the phenomenon of a particular actor or actress,” he says, that “it’s really hard for movie-goers to distinguish the actor from the character.” But this is not a new thing: movie stars “like Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Bogart, they basically played themselves in all those movies.”

The best scene in Michael Clayton is the love scene with Tilda Swinton. “During the rehearsals, she’d knock on my trailer, going, ‘George, let’s rehearse the love scene’.” Acting with her he describes as watching a really good actor at his best. “I love watching Tilda in a bathroom stall, sort of falling apart, which I saw yesterday, actually. Those are the scenes that touch me.”

Clooney, who is to voice the title role in Wes Anderson’s animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic Fantastic Mr Fox, set for release in 2009, comes across as loveable and sane. He claims that he has managed to stay grounded after being in “failed” movies. “Just watch The Facts of Life, and shows like that. I was so horribly over-confident and under-talented.” Maybe it’s his ability to refrain from taking himself too seriously that keeps him from becoming too stressed. He begs to differ: “It’s the way I drink.”

He jokes, but the real reason he has steered away from serious problems with drugs and alcohol, despite maintaining a love of hedonism and the ladies is that: “I saw what a lot of that did to my aunt, Rosemary Clooney [a 1950s singer and actress who suffered a drug-induced breakdown after seeing her friend John F Kennedy assassinated] and it didn’t do her any favours. And I’ve seen what it can do to other people that I’ve known in the industry and it’s sad. You just have to make the decision that you don’t let that stuff ruin your dreams and hopes. You have to stand your ground.”

George doesn’t take his public image too seriously. “Right now, we’re living in a celebrity-obsessed society,” he says, “and there are an awful lot of celebrities out there sucking up the celebrity air who aren’t really doing anything.”

Lydia Bell is the deputy travel editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine