Interesting facts about George Clooney

george clooney

George Clooney is an American actor, filmmaker, activist, businessman, and philanthropist.

His full name is George Timothy Clooney.

He was born on May 6, 1961 in Lexington, Kentucky.

His father, Nick Clooney, was a anchorman and game show host who hosted AMC for five years in the late 1990s and his mother, Nina Bruce (née Warren), was a beauty queen and city councilwoman.

Clooney has an older sister named Adelia (known as Ada).

He has Irish, German, and English ancestry.

Clooney spent most of this youth in Ohio and Kentucky, and graduated from Augusta High School.

He tried out to play professional baseball with the Cincinnati Reds in 1977, but he did not pass the first round of player cuts and was not offered a contract.

Clooney attended Northern Kentucky University from 1979 to 1981, majoring in broadcast journalism, and very briefly attended the University of Cincinnati, but did not graduate from either.

george clooney young

He made money selling women’s shoes, insurance door-to-door, stocking shelves, working construction, and cutting tobacco.

George got his first role as an extra in the 1978 TV-miniseries Centennial.

Clooney’s first major role came in 1984 in the short-lived sitcom E/R (not to be confused with ER, the better-known hospital drama, on which Clooney also co-starred a decade later).

More roles soon followed, including George Burnett, the handsome handyman on the series The Facts of Life (1979); Booker Brooks, a supervisor on the series Roseanne (1988); and Detective James Falconer on the series Sisters (1991).

Clooney had his breakthrough when he was cast as “Dr. Doug Ross” on the award-winning drama series, ER (1994), opposite Anthony Edwards, Noah Wyle, and Julianna Margulies. He stayed on the show between 1994 and 1999.

er

While filming ER, Clooney starred in a number of high profile film roles, such as Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), and One Fine Day (1996), opposite Michelle Pfeiffer.

His lead role in 1997’s Batman & Robin was deemed a failure. Even the actor himself was quoted as saying the film “may have killed the franchise.”

The following year, Clooney starred opposite Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998). He also had a role in Terrence Malick’s war drama The Thin Red Line (1998).

In 1999, he took the lead role in Three Kings, a well-received war satire set during the Gulf War.

three kings

Clooney left ER in 1999 to concentrate on his movie career.

After leaving ER, Clooney starred in the commercially successful films The Perfect Storm (2000), a disaster drama, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a Coen brothers adventure comedy. He earned a Golden Globe Award for his performance as an escaped convict in O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

Clooney’s next film, Ocean’s Eleven (2001), followed a group of con artists as they robbed a casino. His portrayal of Danny Ocean, the group’s ringleader, continued throughout the movie’s sequels, Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007).

oceans thirteen

In 2002, Clooney made his directorial debut with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), an adaptation of TV producer Chuck Barris’s autobiography. This was the first film under the banner of “Section Eight Productions”, a production company he founded with Steven Soderbergh.

In 2006 Clooney won his first Academy Award, as best supporting actor for his portrayal of a cynical CIA agent in Syriana (2005). The complex thriller took a critical look at the oil industry and its impact on international affairs. Clooney was also nominated for best director and best screenwriter for Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). The film—shot in black-and-white and featuring actual newsreel footage—documented journalist Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Both films reflected Clooney’s growing liberal political activism.

syriana

Clooney next appeared in The Good German (2006), a film noir directed by Soderbergh that is set in post-World War II Germany.

In 2006, “Section Eight” was shut down so that Soderbergh could concentrate on directing, and Clooney founded a new production company, “Smokehouse Productions”, with his friend and long-time business partner, Grant Heslov.

In 2007 Clooney starred in the critically acclaimed Michael Clayton, portraying a corporate attorney who pushes ethical boundaries. The role earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

michael clayton

The following year he directed and starred in the 1920s football film Leatherheads (2008) and then reteamed with the Coen brothers for Burn After Reading, a CIA comedy in which he played an adulterous federal marshal.

He next co-starred with Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey in the war parody comedy film The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was directed by Heslov and released in 2009. Also in 2009, he voiced Mr. Fox in Wes Anderson’s animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Clooney’s next starring role was in the 2009 dramatic comedy, Up in the Air, which earned him a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA, and an Academy Award nominations.

up in the air

He than portrayed an assassin on assignment in Italy in the thriller The American (2010).

In 2011 Clooney starred in The Descendants as a husband whose wife has an accident that leaves her in a coma. He earned critical praise for his work, and won the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama. Also, he was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild for Best Actor, the BAFTA Award for Best Actor, and the Academy Award for Best Actor.

the descendants

He moved behind the camera again for the tense political drama The Ides of March (2011), casting himself as a presidential candidate in a cutthroat primary campaign.

In 2013, he received the Academy Award for Best Picture for producing the political thriller Argo.

In 2013 he and Sandra Bullock portrayed astronauts in Gravity, a sci-fi drama about a space mission that goes awry.

He co-wrote, directed and starred in The Monuments Men, an adaption of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel.

the monuments men

He next starred in the fantastical Tomorrowland (2015), about a quest to access a utopian civilization.

Clooney again teamed with the Coen brothers for the Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar! (2016), in which he played a kidnapped movie star.

His character in Jodie Foster’s Money Monster (2016) is a finance pundit who is taken hostage by a former devotee of his advice.

On January 11, 2015, Clooney was awarded the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award.

He is the only person who has been nominated for Academy Awards in six different categories.

Clooney has received: two Oscars, four Golden Globes, and one BAFTA award.

George Clooney has an estimated net worth of $500 million.

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He was married to actress Talia Balsam from 1989 to 1993.

After his marriage to Talia Balsam, Clooney vowed never to remarry, and his various relationships became fodder for the tabloids.

In 2014, however, he married Lebanese English lawyer Amal Alamuddin. The couple had twins, Alexander and Ella, in 2017.

Clooney’s main home is the 683-square-meter (7,354-square-foot) house in Los Angeles.

His vacation home is in Italy, in the village of Laglio, on Lake Como. The house comprises 15 rooms, a wine cellar, and a master bedroom suite atop three floors. In his garage, Clooney keeps his collection of Piaggio motorbikes. Docked at his pier is a Colombo classic powerboat.

In 2013, Clooney co-founded Casamigos Tequila with Rande Gerber and Michael Meldman. In June 2017, it was sold to Diageo for $700 million, with an additional $300 million possible depending on the company’s performance over the next ten years.

His wedding to Amal Clooney (Amal Alamuddin) cost an estimated $4.6 million.

His famed “Roman haircut” was actually an accident. While filming From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), he wanted to make his character Seth Gecko look really crazy with a chopped off hairstyle. But the haircut became popular and turned into a positive.

He gained 13.5 kilograms (30 pounds) for his Oscar winning role as Bob Barnes in Syriana (2005).

Clooney auditioned for the role of Mr. Blonde/Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs (1992), but was turned down.

His favorite song is “Destination Moon” by Dinah Washington.