Interview Jessica Cargill Thompson

When Clive Owen smarmed his way on to our screens and the cover of the TV Times a decade ago as the wily Stephen Crane in 'Chancer', the less charitable assumedthat he would follow a typical telly-totty career trajectory: a nice Sunday evening series playing the dashing vet/policeman/priest in a closeknit rural village; a brooding cop/pathologist/private investigator with a troubled privatelife; the corrupt financier who looks great in a fast car and Armani.

Not a bit of it. Owen, angered by tabloid intrusion and worried he might get stuck in telly, got out of the limelight and into the cloudier world of the British independent film industry ('Close My Eyes', 'Century', 'Bent'). Now, instead of showing Hello! round his charming new north London home, he's worked consistently with top-rank directors, become the darling of American critics following the surprise success there of Mike Hodges' 'Croupier', and fended off persistent speculation that he could follow Pierce Brosnan as Bond. (For the record, he swears he hasn't been approached. And if he was? 'Of course it would be hard to say no to something like that. But I don't sweat about things that aren't in front of me.') If mainstream British audiences have forgotten him (theatregoers may have caught him in 'A Day in the Death of Joe Egg' last year),his rise back to prominence gets well underway this week with the release of Robert Altman's 'Gosford Park', a wry murder mystery which takes place at a 1930s weekend shooting party. By selecting Owen to appear in one of his ensemble films alongside Michael Gambon, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Derek Jacobi, and many, many more - Altman has branded him not just a star, but a credible one.

Owen is keen to repay the compliment. 'I'm a huge fan of his. And now having worked with him, even more so.

Watching him was- he's so impressive. He makes it seem so easy and it really isn't. Pulling 30 people in and keeping storylines balanced. It's like putting together music. He starts off with the text, then it starts to grow and grow, adding layers. And he'll change the camera, then suddenly you've got this great sweeping thing that everyone's part of and you all go for it.' Owen plays RobertParks, valet to Charles Dance's Lord Stockbridge, one of the guests at the party. Owen plays it low key, making his character the enigmatic, silent type that has become his hallmark. Though he manages to say less than most of his co-stars - he cut lines rather than improvising extra ones, to Altman's bemusement - he becomes a powerful presence among the servants, distanced from and elevated above the mundane world of below-stairs gossip.

This is quintessential Owen, a subscriber to the 'less is more' school of acting. This is not to say he's a one-part actor. It's more that he possesses the kind of screen presence overexcited American critics have likened to McQueen, Mitchum, Lancaster and Eastwood: a brooding stillness where a twitch ofa muscle or well timed stare can convey a thousand words. The film, which openedlast year's London Film Festival to great acclaim, is already performing well atthe US box office, and has just won Altman a Golden Globe, fuelling talk that hewill walk off with an Oscar. It's packed with clandestine trysts, buried pasts, inheritances, bad marriages, red herrings, class prejudice, fabulous frocks, andof course as many motives as characters, possibly more. It boasts two or three different narratives taking place simultaneously within the same shot, the numerous storylines skilfully interwoven between 'upstairs' and 'downstairs' as the audience is politely led through the action to the very satisfying (and deducible) dinouement.

'He hates line, line, line, ' says Owen. 'He'll send someone through the middle of it or get someone to start talking loudly over there just to break it up. In a lot of the scenes in the film, the improv stuff is in the foreground and the script's in the back.' It must have been incredibly complex to film? 'He sent a memo to everybody at the beginning saying: "You will get a schedule, but please disregard it. You'll be asked to be around every day, all day. And you will be asked just to be an extra in other people's scenes." ' And everyone was happy with that?

'The deal with Altman is that you're not going to get paid, you're not going to get all the treatment. Everyone was in a little three-way. Everyone was doing itfor a very basic salary.

Everyone's there pretty much because they want to work with him. And that's a pretty good place to start making a film.' 'Gosford Park' puts Owen back in the spotlight here, but it was Mike Hodges' 'Croupier' that drew him to the attention of Hollywood and Altman. A disappointing film with a class cast but a painful script, it was in straight-to-video hell on its first, tiny UK release. (British distributors initially passed on it - including Film Four, who producedit. ) America, on the other hand, fell in love with this charming British crime film, forcing a re-release in the UK, and were on the verge of nominating it forOscars before a technicality over a late-night screening on Dutch TV disqualified it.

'Everything's coming from the States at the moment. I don't think I've been offered any work here for a long time, ' he says.

Despite having been sent scripts for 'a whole variety of films' he's taking his time. 'I had a feeling that this coming year was going to be very important. I turned a number of things down because I didn't think they looked right.' That nearly included a series of ads for BMW - dynamic short films directed by of-themoment directors such as Wong Kar-Wai, Guy Ritchie and Alejandro Gonzalez Iqarritu. 'I said no to begin with. "Croupier" had just happened in America and I didn't know much about the project. I thought it looked a really bad move: overexcited Brit gets an indie hit them jumps straight into BMW commercials.

But they kept coming back and when they said they'd got John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee for the first two, I thought: "My God, I've got to do this!"' He is alsoedging his way towards blockbuster territory.

This year he appears as an assassin pursuing Matt Damon in 'The Bourne Identity', and he is currently shooting 'Beyond Borders' in Canada with Angelina Jolie, directed by Martin Campbell, in which Owen plays 'an angry relief worker'.

But the best thing to have come out of 'Croupier', he says, is that it has allowed him and Mike Hodges to raise the money for another film together. Entitled 'I'll Sleep When I'm Dead', the film casts Owen as a former criminal who got out for a number of years but is then drawn back in.

'It's a fantastic script. I don't speak for the first half of the film.' Sounds perfect. 'Gosford Park' opens on February 1. See Film for details.

'Omnibus - Robert Altman in England' is on BBC2, February 2.

Text thanks to Chris T