Hollywood legend Paul Newman had no idea who George Clooney was when they met but was happy to give him advice on how to navigate fame.
Clooney had been playing Dr Doug Ross for five years on the popular TV medical-drama ER when he crossed paths with the Newman – who was shooting the 1999 romance-drama film Message in a Bottle – on the Warner Bros Studios lot in California.
“‘I’m not as good at getting out as you are. I have a tendency to go, ‘If I go out, that’s going to be an extra hour of talking to people’,” Clooney told the New York Times.
“Paul Newman actually talked about this to me,”
“When I first met him, he was at Warner Bros doing Message in a Bottle, and I was on ER. Newman was sitting outside smoking a cigarette, so I pulled up in the golf cart and was like, ‘Hey, just wanted to say ‘hi’.”
Newman – who died of lung cancer at the age of 83 in 2008 – eventually realised he was speaking to a fellow A-list celebrity when people greeted Clooney as they drove past the pair.
“He had no idea who I was, but everybody who came by on golf carts was like, ‘Hey, George.’ ‘George!’ So bit by bit, he figured out I was successful in the industry in some way,” Clooney said.
“Then he goes, ‘George, don’t let them keep you at home’. He meant very specifically that tendency to isolate because you’re trying to hold onto some privacy.
“My tendency at that moment was to stay in, and hearing Newman say that, it made sense immediately.”
Elsewhere, Clooney hopes his children, nine-year-old twins Alexander and Ella, will not follow in his footsteps and instead, become lawyers like his 47-year-old wife, Amal Clooney.
“I don’t want them in it,” he recently told Entertainment Tonight.
“Well, they actually don’t know what I do for a living yet. No, not really.”
Asked if Alexander and Ella might be interested in becoming lawyers, Clooney replied: “I hope. My god, a lawyer? That’d be amazing.”
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