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Clive Owen: rich mixture

Clive Owen is the consummate actor who loves to mix his roles—Chancer, Croupier, Closer and beyond—and steps out into a new field as the face of Lancôme Men
Excerpted from issue 24 of Lucire

CLIVE OWEN was Victoria University’s law school’s babe magnet once upon a time. In 1992, Chancer aired on TV One in New Zealand, and Owen, playing post-yuppie City boy Stephen Crane—whom we find out later is actually a lad called Derek Love—had the female members of the class, and probably a few males, swooning. Owen played a City type trying to help a Morgan-type car factory into the 1990s, opposite a cast that included Susannah Harker, Leslie Phillips and Peter Vaughn. It is perhaps no surprise that the man whose good looks had law students swooning has become a male model of sorts: the signature face of Lancôme Men.

Chancer was Owen’s first major series on UK TV, though he had performed in plays in his youth. (At school, his career teacher thought that his ambition to be an actor was ‘a joke’.) But most people fell for the actor’s charms when he made it to the big screen in Croupier, directed by Mike Hodges. ‘When we made that film, it had a tiny budget,’ says Owen just prior to the Lancôme Men launch in California. ‘It was something like a six-week shoot and the people who made it, Channel 4, didn’t really like it, so they wanted to put it straight out on to TV. So it was really because of a great friend of Mike Hodges who really championed it over here in LA.

‘He had good contacts, was a friend of Robert Altman, who liked the film, and he put on screenings and spread good word of mouth. To America, it was like the first thing I’d done. So over here, my career starts there—which is quite liberating in a way.’

Following that, Owen appeared in Gosford Park, The Bourne Identity, Beyond Borders, King Arthur, Sin City and Inside Man, plus was a favourite for some time as a possible James Bond to follow from Pierce Brosnan.

Owen has kept his hand on stage, admiting that British actors tended to have competences in every medium out of necessity and lack of work, notably in the West End and Broadway play Closer (the movie ver sion, which Owen also starred in, earned him a BAFTA).

‘Closer was another serious gear change after [Croupier]. It was such a great part, a brilliant piece of writing, and I knew the material so well [from stage],’ he says.

Most recently, it was the chilling Children of Men that has earned him headlines, and Owen has just wrapped filming The Golden Age. ‘Alfonso [Cuaron, the director of Children of Men] was very clever with that film. ‘The central thought is the same [as the novel’s], but the characters are quite different and there are huge themes that he brought into the movie, like immigration.’

That résumé alone is probably enough to put him in the pages of the fashion press. But there are a few more reasons. Owen has endorsed one other brand before, BMW, and did it with plenty of aplomb and credibility. As a true actor, he never seemed like he was selling out—probably because the BMW “commercials” he starred in never seemed like ads.

Read the remainder of this article, including Clive Owen’s work on the Lancôme Men advertisements, in issue 24 of Lucire in print.

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Owen had performed in plays in his youth. At school, his career teacher thought that his ambition to be an actor was ‘a joke’