Hits or no, Clooney is the real deal, says DONALD CLARKE

WHAT MAKES a movie star? Veering towards the esoteric, we might mention charm, talent and good looks. Do I hear a cynical snort from the cheap seats? “It’s not show friendship, you know,” my imaginary heckler bellows. “It’s show business.”

Thanks for that. In other words, a movie star is, surely, somebody who makes a great deal of money for the studios.

You’ll find plenty of nice- looking young “actors” waiting tables or servicing dry cleaning in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard. Some have done decent work in off-Broadway productions of Shakespeare. But few can honestly call themselves celebrities.

Now, consider the strange case of George Clooney. Suggest that the great man is anything other than a movie star – perhaps, with apologies to Mr Depp, the era’s quintessential movie star – and most sane people will rapidly phone for the men with the butterfly nets. Still, Clooney is not exactly what you’d call a box-office draw.

Next week, he turns up in his fourth film as director. The Ides of March, a strong drama set during the US presidential primaries, didn't set the tills whirling on its American debut. Indeed, it made slightly less than Leatherheads, the last film for which he wielded the microphone, and that was regarded as a major flop. Indeed, if you ignore the three Ocean's pictures, then George Clooney begins to look like medium- strength box-office poison.

No other Clooney film released over the past decade has made more than $100 million in US cinemas. (It comes as an even bigger shock to discover that the last non-Ocean’s picture to achieve that feat was, of all things, A Perfect Storm back in 2000.)

None of this is meant as criticism. The reasons for his relative underperformance are less to do with any lack of charm (as if) than his determination to avoid films in which giant lizards eat Manhattan. You might argue that he's getting on a little. Well, yes. But, at 50, he's only two years older than Johnny Depp, who is – in these days of dwindling star power – one of the few actors who can just about guarantee a box-office hit. The truth is that big audiences were never going to turn out for films as off-centre as The Good German, The Americanand Syriana.

For all that, film distributors will, when planning premieres, still sell their grannies to get George on the red carpet. Studios, trusting to hope over experience, continue to finance his niche projects.

All this speaks of a charming, somewhat sentimental belief in the old-fashioned attributes of the golden-era movie star. Nearly 50 years after Cary Grant last made a film, we still yearn for the solid jaw, the cheeky twinkle and the hint of sly intelligence.

Clooney is the E-Type Jaguar of movie actors. Everybody admires his class, but relatively few are prepared to pay money to (help, the analogy is breaking down) sit in his driving seat. But it’s nice to have him around.