GEORGE CLOONEY FAME, FAMILY & THE future

THE STAR REFLECTS ON HIS CHARMED CAREER, LIFE WITH AMAL AND RAISING KIDS IN PRIVATE

- Jennie Noonan

When filmmaker Noah Baumbach and co-writer Emily Mortimer began working on the script for Jay Kelly, their film about an iconic movie star confronting the cost of life in the spotlight, casting George Clooney became an early priority.

"We kind of knew it needed a movie star to play the movie star, because the audience needed to feel a history with the character - they're watching in the same way the people in the movie feel with the character," Baumbach told The Hollywood Reporter in October. "George seemed like a great one, because there's something timeless about him. He feels like he could be a movie star in any time period."

Clooney was happy to oblige. "I read it, and I was like, 'Well, if I take time to think of it, they might go get Brad [Pitt],'" he joked during an interview with CBS News in November. "I can't have that, man! When you read something, you know."

With 50-odd films and more than three decades in the industry, Clooney's own life may mirror the pampered A-list character, but he says it was the differences between him and Jay that attracted him the most.

"When I read the script, the two things I thought of were, I knew how to play the guy, but I was also so thrilled that in real life I hadn't lived a life of regret, which is what this guy is dealing with at 64 years old," he told The Hollywood Reporter at the New York Film Festival on September 30. "So I was thrilled that I was going to get a chance to explore it, but I was also thrilled that I wasn't actually living that life."

Raised in Kentucky by his mother, Nina, a beauty queen and city councilwoman, and his father, Nick, a TV newscaster and talk-show host, Clooney endured years of false starts in Hollywood. He cycled through failed pilots and appeared in flops such as Return to Horror High (1987) and Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988) before his breakout role as Dr Doug Ross on ER in 1994.