Last autumn, a little British film opened in a couple of cinemas in America - and was still there six months later, laden with rave reviews.

Not even the star of Croupier, Clive Owen, would have predicted that, or that it would miss out on Oscar nominations only because of a technicality. After all, it was a complex, low-budget film made in 1998 and had been virtually disowned by its backer, Channel 4. They didn't think it even merited a poster campaign when it crept into one London cinema for two weeks in June 1999.

That Croupier is now getting a proper release in its homeland is particularly sweet for its veteran director, Mike Hodges, whose Get Carter remains the daddy of all Brit gangster flicks. But above all, it's sweet for Owen. His exceptional performance as Jack Manfred, the croupier of the title, was the talk of Hollywood late last year, and now the one-time TV heartthrob is filming Gosford Park for Robert Altman - and being touted as a contender to take over from Pierce Brosnan as the next James Bond.

Which is perhaps no real surprise, as Owen spends much of Croupier in a dinner jacket. "It's not a huge leap of the imagination," he grins. Dressed in a smart black suit for the photographer, the dark-haired, green-eyed 36-year-old is a slightly jumpy but warm presence, and, refreshingly, he refuses to speak in the soundbites beloved by most of his contemporaries.

Croupier is not your standard crime thriller. The story - a struggling writer takes a night job dealing cards at a London casino and gets caught up in a plot to rob it - is enigmatic and deliberately elusive. Manfred's motives are equally tricky to pin down, and much of Owen's dialogue comes in the form of a voice-over. "That's the personality of the film," he points out. "Unusually, it wasn't narrative voice-over; it wasn't just filling in gaps in the narrative, it was like having a chat to the audience."

It's a huge credit to Owen that he makes such an internal role so absorbing to watch, but Hodges's depiction of the venal life of the casino is just as fascinating. "The reason it's such a strange, intense world is cash," states Owen, who spent two weeks at croupier school prior to shooting the film. "We live in a world where everything is credit cards and everything is double-checked. In casinos, you've got huge amounts of actual money changing hands all the time. Plus you get the whole spectrum of people. You get people gambling their last fiver and, in the same casino, millionaires putting thousands of pounds on blackjack."

Channel 4, though, wasn't as enthusiastic as Owen about the film. In fact, they hated it so much that they decided not to release it. Apparently, they felt that it was just a little too sophisticated and offbeat. In the end, it only made it to the one cinema because the British Film Institute sponsored a two-week run. "We got a couple of good reviews, and I just assumed that on the back of that something would happen. But nothing did," recalls Owen. "Then you just assume it's going to end up on TV. You know how many small films just disappear."

But Hodges didn't stop championing his movie, and, finally, it was picked up by a US distributor as part of a package of six films. "There was a call saying: 'It's going to get a modest release in the States' - 17 screens for two weeks. I just thought: 'Well, at least it has a life, at least it's out there.' But the reviews were amazing, and it just gathered momentum and ended up on 134 screens."

Such was the impact of the film on American critics that they were soon talking up its Oscar chances. In particular, Owen was being singled out as a likely bet for a best actor nomination. Then the Academy of Motion Pictures ruled that Croupier was ineligible for the Oscars because it had been briefly released in Singapore the year before, as well as having been screened on Dutch television.

But if Owen is screaming inside at the prospect of having missed out at a crack at his profession's biggest prize, then he's putting a brave face on it.

"When I first heard the Oscar rumours, I thought, 'Oh yeah.' But then they started cropping up everywhere, and it was so well reviewed that you start to think: 'Well, you never know.' But, to be truthful, it's such a fantastic story for a little film to have a life like that.

Ultimately, it's all about the work. Me and Mike are going to do another film together, and so it's fantastic that Croupier has given us the chance to do that."

If that sounds like he's trying to convince himself, as much as us, that small is beautiful, then in his defence, it's not as if Owen hasn't tasted the LA lifestyle before. Back in 1996, he starred opposite Halle Berry in The Rich Man's Wife, a distinctly mediocre studio offering. The mere mention of it makes Owen guffaw. "You have to be diplomatic, you can't slag things off. Let's say I did Rich Man's Wife because I wanted to do a film in LA, I just wanted that experience."

He wasn't tempted to stay on. "I could have hung out there and gone: 'Right, I'm really going to work LA.' But ultimately, I'd have been going around trying to get medium-to-small parts in bad movies. How do I hold that up against getting good plays, the top end of television and interesting low-budget films here? Why would I want that when I've got a full career here?"

Indeed, Owen has hardly been out of work since he graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramtic Art (Rada) in 1987. Just two years later, his role as Stephen Crane in Chancer had made him a TV star and tabloid pin-up. Set in the days when merchant bankers were still considered sexy, it now looks as dated as a 1980s mobile phone, but it made Owen a household name. It was not a position he enjoyed, and he soon gained a reputation as a spiky and sometimes petulant personality.

"I was a young guy suddenly thrown into the middle of the tabloids, and it was difficult, uncomfortable," he says. "I was quite serious about my work, so I didn't want to become TV fodder. So I was just trying to find my way through it, and that often meant I'd talk honestly about it and say: 'I find it difficult.' But when you read that in a newspaper, you think: 'That f***ing guy's got a big part on TV, he's got money and he's moaning.' You just look like a tosser."

Having spent almost two years on the dole between leaving his Coventry comprehensive and going to Rada, Owen should maybe have realised his good fortune earlier. "I was doing what half of Coventry was doing at that time, playing pool and waiting for the next Giro. There was a lot of unemployment then, it didn't feel unusual." But he seems never to have doubted that he would act. "I did a school play, and from then on I used to say in careers lessons: 'I want to be an actor.' I don't know where it came from, but I was always clear about it."

Rada turned his ambition into reality. "Getting into Rada, above everything else in my career, is the key thing, because if you're a working-class kid from a place like Coventry, where are you going to get plugged into what you want to do? The most important thing about going to a drama school is exactly that, it's getting plugged into the environment. For me, and a lot of the people who were there at that time, that was so key."

Now he commutes between film sets and the Islington home he shares with his wife, the actress Sarah-Jane Fenton, and their two daughters. They married in 1995, having met when he played Romeo to her Juliet in a Young Vic production: "It's so schmaltzy, there's no way round it. It happened, however schmaltzy it sounds." She's suspended her career to look after the kids, but that might change. "She's got things she wants to fulfil, and I'd support her as much as I could," claims Owen.

For the moment, though, he's the one in demand. Before Gosford Park, he played a hitman chasing Matt Damon through Paris in the upcoming thriller The Bourne Identity, and then there are those Bond rumours. Owen would not need much convincing to become the sixth incarnation of 007. "Are you kidding? Of course, I'd seriously consider it. They still do bloody well."

So will he.

Croupier is rereleased on June 1