By Katrina Onstad -- National Post

Clive Owen -- and please refrain from asking Clive Who?; he's heard it before -- is wondering what to pack for his trip to Toronto this weekend: "Is it autumn-y there? Is it like London?" he asks from his home in London over a bad phone connection that makes his voice sound even deeper and more cracked than usual.

Owen will be flying to Toronto for the film festival this weekend, but when he leaves, he'll return home via L.A. A little British movie called Croupier that sat on a shelf for three years has suddenly awakened a lust for Owen in America.

Back in England, the dashing 35-year-old has been generating a substantial amount of lust for many years as a television star; a poll in the early Nineties revealed that 70% of the nine-million-plus audience who watched him play a P.I. named Chancer every week were female. But when Croupier -- a noir film about casino dealers made in 1997 -- was rereleased in the United States six months ago to rave reviews, people stopped asking Clive Who? (or mistaking him for Rupert Everett, Hugh Grant and the other pretty-boy Brits with whom he's been unjustly lumped).

The Toronto International Film Festival will premiere Owen's latest film, Greenfingers, a gentle comedy about prisoners who become award-winning gardeners, a very British premise with a Full Monty spirit that promises to be a crowd-pleaser. (Who cares if the director is American: Have you ever heard of a more British premise than competitive gardening?)

So Owen's life is changing. As Croupier director Mike Hodges said last month, "He's been to L.A. before but never as a hot property. His whole career has opened up. It's odd because neither of us has changed, I'm not a better director than I was before and Clive's not a better actor, but suddenly there's so much interest." Owen laughs when he hears the quote, punctuating it with an English: "Right, right."

"It's very different going to L.A. on the back of a body of work that people have seen," he says, sounding a little tired (he's been in meetings all day, of course). "I'd been to things before in Hollywood where it was clear that the people talking to me had never really seen anything I'd done. Maybe they had rented a video if I was lucky."

The curious didn't have far to look: Owen has been working consistently for years, taking on roles in such art-house fare as the incest drama Close My Eyes and Bent, about gay prisoners of war in Nazi Germany.

"I always came back from L.A. thinking there was no point in me sitting out there waiting for work when I got offered very good work here," he says. So does he feel vindicated now, his choice to stay in England having panned out quite nicely at last? He laughs: "A little vindicated, a little."

Of course, Croupier is not exactly a film for the masses, either; Owen plays a croupier caught in a dangerous scam. Greenfingers, in which Owen is a stoic prisoner who leads his band of mismatched cons to the prestigious Hampton Court flower show, is an uncharacteristically sunny project for an actor who does brooding very well.

"I was aware it had a lighter touch than many of the things I'd done, but it wasn't really a conscious decision," he says.

The film is being promoted as a true story -- "I think those guys just won something in Chelsea," says Owen. "But I never met them." -- though in fact, director Joel Hershman read an article in The New York Times about an "open prison" where the prisoners became gardeners, and only loosely based his script on the article.

Owen was asked to perform many delicate horticultural tasks -- he plants a mean primrose -- about which he was somewhat clueless. "This film has not made me any better at gardening. There was a gardening expert on set who at any moment could very succinctly point us in the right direction, so I relied on that."

He relied also, as always, on his face: Owen has one of the most expressive mugs in the business, and his characters are frequently men of few words. "There's too much dialogue in film," he says. "Good atmosphere can be broken when writers are afraid an audience won't get it. My instinct is always: If you don't need it, get rid of it. Trim it down, trim it down."

Owen has had a lifetime to refine his theories on acting. During career days at his elementary school in northern working-class Coventry, the teacher asked what the kids wanted to be when they grew up. Owen announced that he wanted to become an actor. "I remember the careers teacher actually encouraging the kids to laugh: 'Oh come on, get real.' But I knew it was what I was going to do. I'm a terrible cliché, really."

When he graduated, he applied to theatre school, got in, and then declined. "At the time, I didn't think anybody could be taught how to act."

For two years, he lived on the dole in Coventry. "I was shining on like a lot of people, doing absolutely nothing. There was a lot of unemployment," he recalls. After two years, Owen hadn't landed a single acting job; suddenly he revised his anti-education philosophy. He applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and was accepted. There, he met his wife, the actress Sarah-Jane Fenton, while playing Romeo to her Juliet. (The couple now have two young children.)

When Owen heads to L.A. after the festival, it won't be the first time: A few years ago, he played Halle Berry's lover in the trashy faux-Hitchock film The Rich Man's Wife. (He won't slag it, however, saying very slowly, "I don't want to upset anyone. At the time I definitely wanted to make and American film, and" -- he pauses -- "let's just say I made one.")

Asked about the differences between making movies in England and Hollywood, Owen tells a story about his first day on the set of The Rich Man's Wife. During a read-through, a woman came around with a box of sunglasses. "She said, 'Do you want to choose your sunglasses?' I thought, 'I must be in L.A.' "

And he will be.

* Greenfingers is playing Sept. 10, 9:30 p.m., Visa Screening Room (Elgin) and Sept. 12, 12:30 p.m., Uptown.