The son of broadcast journalist Nick Clooney and the nephew of famed singer Rosemary Clooney, Clooney was born May 6, 1961, in Lexington, KY. He made his first television appearance at age five, on his father’s talk show, The Nick Clooney Show. He did not show up again on television until he was in his early twenties; growing up, Clooney had a passion for baseball and only turned to acting after a failed tryout with the Cincinnati Reds. He started out in television commercials and then signed with Warner Bros. Up until E.R., Clooney had played only occasional roles in feature films (he made his debut with a small role in the 1986 movie Combat High) and had starred in a couple of low-budget videos. When hospital drama series ER hit American TV screens in 1994, George Clooney finally achieved the “overnight” success that he’d been working solidly towards for more than a decade. As maverick paediatrician Dr Doug Ross, he won over the hearts of millions. Following E.R.’s success, however, he found himself besieged by scripts and movie offers. For his first big-budget project, he chose to play an action hero in the Quentin Tarantino-written and -produced schlock horror extravaganza From Dusk Till Dawn. After that, he appeared in the romantic comedy One Fine Day opposite Michelle Pfeiffer. For Clooney, 1997 proved to be a good year, as he appeared in three major films, the most hyped of which was Batman & Robin, with the actor replacing Val Kilmer as the mysterious Dark Knight. Though the film is widely considered the worst of the big-screen Batman series, Clooney did receive some praise for bringing an extra sensitivity to his interpretation of Batman. He received greater praise the following year, with roles in two wildly divergent films, Out of Sight, in which he played a suave bank robber, and Terrence Malick’s adaptation of The Thin Red Line.
In 1999, following his much-talked-about departure from E.R. he continued to work on a number of high-profile projects, first lending his voice to the animated South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and then starring alongside Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube as an American soldier reclaiming Kuwaiti treasure from Saddam Hussein in David O. Russell’s Three Kings. George Clooney was awarded a 2000 Golden Globe for his portrayal of a pomade-obsessed escaped convict in the Coen brothers’ throwback comedy O Brother Where Art Thou? It was around this time that Clooney, now an established actor equally as comfortable on the big screen as the small, began to branch out as the Executive Producer of such made-for-TV efforts as Killroy (1999) and Fail Safe (2000). Soon producing such features as Rock Star (2001) and Insomnia (2002), Clooney next re-teamed with Out of Sight director Steven Soderbergh for a modern take on a classic Rat Pack comedy with Ocean’s Eleven (2001). After the dynamic film duo stuck together for yet another remake, the deep-space psychological science-fiction drama Solaris (2002), busy Clooney would both produce and appear in Welcome to Collinwood and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind later the same year, also making his directorial debut on the latter.,