BY LUAINE LEE - Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - When he was a school kid in Britain's lower-class Midlands, Clive Owen wanted to be an actor. He didn't even try to hide his passion from his jeering schoolmates.

"Here was me and this guy Dominic, who wanted to be a guitarist. He said 'guitarist' and I'd say 'actor,' and they'd go, 'Ye-a-a-w-h.' The teacher would encourage them to laugh, 'Get real.' But I was a stupid little thing, that's what I kept saying I was going to do."

The star of films like "The Bourne Identity," "Croupier," and now "King Arthur" did it all right, but not the usual way. "I flunked all my exams, just didn't want to know," he said.

"It wasn't unusual for a kid to go to my school and not get the exams. I was completely uninterested, I was just interested in acting."

He joined a youth theater but when those plays dried up, he found himself "hanging out and signing on." Signing on, in England, means signing up for welfare and choosing a trade where you might be useful. For Owen it was carpentry, which absorbed his interest about as much as astrophysics.

Always stubborn, he clung to his dream. Now, as the legendary sovereign in "King Arthur," Owen seems to personify that man of mythic ambitions - both on screen and in real life.

When a teacher first suggested he try studying acting, he rejected the idea. "I was an arrogant little so-and-so, I said, 'You can't teach people to act, I'm not going to acting school.' She said, 'Clive, that's the way in, that's what you have to do.'

"I signed on - unemployed for two years in carpentry and thought, 'How am I ever going to be an actor, sitting here signing on in carpentry every week?' I tried to make the money last over two weeks. By the end that was being stretched to the breaking point, because you signed on to carpentry, you're not going to get acting jobs poured in your lap."

Owen, 38, said he had no other options. "There must be self-belief in there, but there was just never anything else. What choice did I have? You come from an upbringing I had, and it's either boxing or acting."

He eventually did apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts with little hope that he'd be accepted. Two years later he was accepted. After training, he started landing work. "I did a small film that nobody saw and never got released. I did a BBC drama and had quite a nice part, with little gaps in between. It wasn't flooding forward. Then suddenly I landed a very big TV series called 'Chancer,' and it was very much based around me and my character. And the whole campaign was pushing me to the front, and I never looked back."

Even so, sudden fame was unnerving to the reticent actor.

"I hated it. I found it very uncomfortable. Because in the U.K., TV is tabloid fodder so I was suddenly thrown into all the tabloid newspapers. I was made into the heartthrob, sex symbol. And I found the attention very unsettling. To go from where I had come from was very disorientating, and it would have been easy to lose my way."

Fortunately he married former actress Sarah Jane Fenton, who helped him get a grip. "I basically pulled out, stopped doing press for a year, didn't talk to anyone, and got a very bad reputation, but I just thought, 'I need my time with this,'" he said.

"From then on I consciously tried to stay illusive. I've always mixed TV, theater and film up. I was very tempted - I could have become the guy with all the cash. I got off, I wanted to be in for the long haul. I didn't want them to chew me up and spit me out."

The TV series "Second Sight," elevated him to the top of the game and the small film, "Croupier," earned him an envious reputation in the U.S. American roles followed like the assassin in "The Bourne Identity," the relief worker in "Beyond Borders," the ex-con in "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead."

But he didn't come to conquer America, said Owen, seated at a white-clothed table in a meeting room of a hotel here.

"It opened up for me, I didn't come here looking for it. It just happened by fluke with that little film, 'Croupier,' which came and made an impact and introduced me to an American audience. I wasn't aiming to come and break America; I was perfectly content in England doing the work I was doing. I didn't feel I was missing out on anything. I love making movies, I want to make movies. They've never made that many in the U.K., but I was still very fulfilled and very determined to do theater, and suddenly 'Croupier' introduced me to an American audience and my life hasn't been quite the same since."