Clive Owen Says David Bowie ‘Has More to Do With Me Being an Actor’ Than Anyone Else: ‘He Showed Me You Can Create Worlds’

variety.com:

Nick Holdsworth Clive Owen has not forgotten his roots. Growing up in a working-class family in Coventry in the 1970s U.K., he yearned to explore different roles in life – and the youth wing of the city’s civic Belgrade Theatre gave him that opportunity.

More than four decades later, Owen — who most recently appeared in “Monsieur Spade” as an aging Sam Spade drawn back into the game to solve a post-World War II murder mystery in the south of France — credits that experience as the foundation for his career. “That is where it all started for me — joining the youth theater was a life changer for me,” he recalls. “The city is still a very tough one, and places like the youth theater are a lifeline for kids like me to discover the arts and do something.” Owen wanted to play as many parts as possible, to be “challenged, to be scared, to be kept alive,” he says.

And those are still the essentials of acting that keep him going today. “I went back to the theater recently to do a talk,” he tells Variety at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where he received the President’s Award Saturday night. “I wanted to tell the kids there that it is possible [to have a career as an actor],” he says. “Places like that youth theater are essential in impoverished cities.

We need to finance those things.” The other great influence in a career that has spanned the stage (he played Dan in the London National Theatre production of Patrick Marber’s “Closer” in 1997) and film – including Mike Nichols’ screen version of the play in 2004, where he played Larry — is David Bowie. “Bowie probably has more to do with me being an actor than any actors.