Owen Wilson - Biography

Name: Owen Wilson

Born: 18 November 1968 (Age: 41)

Where: Dallas, Texas, USA

Height: 5' 10"

Awards: Nominated for 1 Oscar and 1 BAFTA

With a CV containing such giant hits as Wedding Crashers, Night At The Museum, Marley & Me, Zoolander, Shanghai Noon and Meet The Parents, Owen Wilson could quite reasonably be described as the biggest comedy star of the new millennium. As a prominent member of the Frat Pack - a loose group of comedians also including Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn and Jack Black - he's won himself a huge audience with a persona that's kooky but cool, wired but easy-going , selfish but sincere. Yet Wilson is not simply a charming personality. Famed for his improvisation, he's also an Oscar-nominated writer and, both in comedy and out, an accomplished actor capable of real dramatic power. His serial killer in The Minus Man was one of the most disturbed and disturbing of them all.

He was born Owen Cunningham Wilson on the 18th of November, 1968 in Dallas, Texas, to Robert Andrew Wilson and his wife Laura (nee Cunningham). A brother, Andrew, was born four years earlier, with another, Luke, arriving three years later.

Robert was a well-educated Bostonian writer and budding entrepreneur, who'd graduated from prestigious Dartmouth College in the class of 1963. Laura was also raised in New England, in a small town just south of Boston, but had been born in Fort Worth to James Cunningham, the city's most prominent engineer, and Lawrie Ann. Robert and Laura, both of Irish Catholic stock, would marry young, produce baby Andrew, then take off for Laura's home state of Texas, Robert being transferred west by the Scott Paper Company. In Dallas, Robert would meet Ralph Rogers, president of Texas Industries, a company producing construction materials, mostly cement and steel. Rogers would hire Wilson as his administrative assistant, valuing his experience in advertising and corporate communications. When Rogers in the late 1960s took over as chairman of KERA, a public TV and radio station in Dallas that served the whole of north Texas, he'd make Wilson president.

At this stage KERA was small but pushing to grow. Though it was part-funded by public funds and advertising, it also needed to attract subscribers, members of the public paying an annual fee to become - theoretically at least - the company's owners. Imagination was needed to boost figures and Wilson was the man for the job. Stylish, erratic, a mine of ideas (many of which he'd never follow up), he'd burn through five or six secretaries a year as he drove the company forward. As the majority of subscribers were middle class and based in north Dallas, Wilson would concentrate on cultural diversity.

He'd put on ballet and opera, the Boston symphony orchestra, he'd screen meetings of Dallas City council meetings live. There'd be specialist shows for women and black people. Wilson ambitiously created the Woman Alive show in league with Ms Magazine, even flew to New York to discuss the project with Gloria Steinem and Pat Carbine, but KERA could only afford to make the pilot and would lose the show to a richer New York station. There would be big successes, though. Wilson would bring Monty Python's Flying Circus to America when he signed the show for KERA in 1974. By then he'd already changed the face of TV news with Newsroom.

In the late Sixties, during a strike, San Francisco's public TV channel KQED had been forced to have its reporters relay the news rather than a smooth-voiced anchorman. Their sincerity and enthusiasm had gone down well and Wilson took this idea to KERA, got funding from the Ford Foundation and hired Jim Lehrer, former city editor of the Times Herald. At 6.30 each evening, opening to the sound of The Beatles' Here Comes The Sun, reporters and guests seated at desks drawn up in a semi-circle around monitor Lehrer would discuss council meetings, court sessions, school matters, anything of local import. Hard questions would be asked and questions thrown up, Lehrer asking his reporters to check out the facts and report back next day. Feedback from viewers after the show would throw up more questions, more stories. The authorities, of course, hated it, and the flashy, wildly enthusiastic, sometimes impetuous Wilson would become a very controversial figure. But it was hugely popular with the thousands of young professionals then moving to north Dallas from the east and west coasts. In 1972, Lehrer would leave for Washington, and all the other Dallas papers, magazines and stations would catch up, but Wilson and Lehrer had made their mark, digging deep into the news before Watergate made it fashionable. Beyond this, between 1970 and 1975, Wilson raised the number of KERA subscribers from 2,000 to 27,000.

Thus young Owen would be raised in well-to-do surrounds, in a ranch-style house in north Dallas, living on the same street as multi-millionaire Ross Perot. There'd be constant visitors from the worlds of politics and the arts. Holidays would be spent back in New England, perhaps joining the grandparents up at Lake Sunapee, a glacial lake in New Hampshire. There'd also be excursions out into Texas hill country, the Edwards Plateau, where the boys would swim in the Guadalupe River.

As kids, the Wilson boys would also get to travel in truly illustrious company. After leaving KERA, their dad would set up Wilson Associates, a corporate communications firm dealing in advertising, branding, graphic design, film production, all aspects of commercial life. He'd take on new ventures as well as companies from the Fortune 500.

He'd also be an advisor to the Amon Carter Museum in his wife's hometown of Fort Worth and got to know the museum's director, Mitch Wilder. Wilder was a big fan of photographer Richard Avedon, famed for his portraits of Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, several presidents, the Chicago Seven and many others. Wilder wanted to put on an Avedon exhibition in Fort Worth, but not just a collection of classic pictures. Far more ambitious than that, he wanted to commission a new series of Avedon portraits, an unlikely proposition for most museums, let alone one so far from America's more obvious centres of culture. Still, Wilder and Wilson would fly to New York, meet Avedon and persuade him to embark on the project. After a trial shoot in March, 1979, Avedon would agree.

. Of course Avedon couldn't simply pitch up in Texas and start shooting. He'd need a researcher, and so Wilson would introduce him to his wife, Laura, a Fort Worth girl with a good eye. Avedon liked her and took her on and so, for six straight summers between 1979 and 1984, she would scout for and travel with Avedon as he took his world-renowned pictures of miners, oil field workers, ranchers and householders from the Rio Grande through Texas, up the Rockies to Canada, eventually exhibited as In The American West. And Laura's boys would often be there, too, particularly Owen and Luke, travelling on those long car rides with their mother, chatting with Richard Avedon, fly-fishing with silver miners in Idaho, witnessing the taking of some of America's most iconic portraits. It's strange to see those classic photos now, so severe and human, and imagine Owen Wilson larking about just out of shot.

On the side, the boys' dad would be a contributing editor and columnist for Dallas's D Magazine, also writing for the Morning News and the Boston Globe. He'd work on lecture series for the university of Texas that would be turned into books and TV programmes. Laura, meanwhile, would have a new career kick-started by the Avedon project, going on to shoot lauded studies of west Texas ranchers and the Hutterite colonies of Montana. A career in the arts was thus a definite possibility for all three of their boys, they were constantly surrounded by people who lived such lives. Young Owen would be a big reader, his trips into the country giving him a particular love of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His imagination was further boosted by his time at the Lamplighter School on Inwood Road in Dallas, a co-ed elementary day school that attempted to excite a child's natural curiosity, rather than simply force it to memorize answers. "A student is not a vessel to be filled, but a lamp to be lighted", ran the motto, and indeed there was great scope for students to pursue music, drama and art. An interest in performance was further heightened by the school's carnival, Halloween parade and hootenannies.

A sense of responsibility was instilled, too, with Lamplighter keeping chickens and fourth graders selling the eggs at the carpool.

. Owen would move from here to the prestigious prep school St Mark's, set in forty acres and geared towards teaching the sons of doctors, lawyers and wealthy businessmen. There were some 800 students, known as Marksmen, with a class average of 15. There was a library, a greenhouse, a planetarium and observatory, while the Wilderness Programme would see kids taken out on annual camping trips. The Wilsons' neighbour Ross Perot sent his son here, other alumni including Tommy Lee Jones and the musicians Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. It was here that Wilson would begin his writing career in earnest, having his first story published in the school newspaper. More would follow, one concerning his brother Andrew shooting a deer. Unfortunately, he'd be expelled while in 10th Grade for stealing the answers to a geometry exam from a teacher's desk, completing the year at Thomas Jefferson High School in the Preston Hollow area of Dallas, past pupils including actress Brenda Vaccaro and the musicians Michael Nesmith and Meat Loaf. This was a totally different environment to that of St Mark's as, in the mid-Eighties, the student body was becoming predominantly Hispanic, drawn from the mainly Latino districts north of Love Field. For Wilson, it would be a very valuable dip into street-life, allowing him to experience different lives and values, different jargon and attitudes. As a writer, this was an essential widening.

But Wilson's street experience would not last long as he'd be sent to complete his High School years at the New Mexico Military Institute, known as the West Point of the West. Aptly, given the bizarre nature of some of Wilson's later material, this was situated at Roswell. With its motto Duty, Honour, Achievement, the school would place discipline high on its list of priorities. Students caught stealing geometry papers would be court-martialled and sentenced to death. Probably. Such was the institute's tough reputation that no one had ever dared try such a stunt.

Very, very sporty, the NMMI would concentrate on physical development, as well as encouraging its students to reach beyond normal levels in academia and leadership skills. The famed hotelier Conrad Hilton had studied here, as had legendary Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and a host of American servicemen and women (the student population was about 20% female). This was a boarding school that fostered punctuality, order, courtesy, respect for authority, self-reliance, initiative, discipline above all, qualities one would not associate with Wilson's usual on-screen persona. With such a background he is clearly deeper, better-rounded and more complex than many cinema-goers imagine.

Wilson would graduate from NMMI, then move on to the University of Southern California.

Again, considering that laidback persona, you'd have thought that this move west would have been a liberation, freeing the surfer dude within. But Wilson was lonely in Los Angeles, lonely and out of place, and after just one year would return to his home state, enrolling at the University of Texas, in Austin, where he'd major in English. It was in a playwriting seminar here that Wilson would make the most important professional connection of his life. Also in the class of nine students would be Wes Anderson, from Houston. Though both had had stories published in the college literary magazine, they had not met before. Impressed by Wilson's shamelessly reading a newspaper in class, Anderson would strike up conversation and the pair would quickly grow close., both being the second of three brothers and both having a father in advertising. Anderson was a keen film buff and had shot many Super-8 movies back in Houston, using the neighbourhood kids as actors. Wilson, too, was a film fan and, once the pair had agreed to share a flat, they'd sit up late into the night discussing their favourite directors and movies - Badlands, Drugstore Cowboy, The Godfather - building a shared vision. When they argued with their landlord over some broken windows, they'd stage a mock break-in and report it to the police, then move out in the middle of the night, only to be tracked down by a private detective hired by the landlord. Anderson would have to make a film about the landlord's properties to calm the situation. It was the kind of absurd, half-arsed plan that would form the centre of their breakthrough movie, Bottle Rocket.

Together, Wilson and Anderson would write a term paper, Anderson doing most of the work, and Anderson's strong work ethic would also bring Wilson his acting debut. When the playwright students were each asked to write a play, only Anderson would complete one. Titled A Night In Tunisia, it was a warped take on Sam Shepard's True West and, with some difficulty, Anderson would persuade Wilson to take the lead part when the play was staged in the college auditorium. As said, it wasn't easy. Considering himself to be a writer, not an actor, thinking he'd be a novelist or at least move into advertising like his dad, Wilson was always trying to get other students to take the roles he'd been asked to play. His lack of confidence was in evidence during the first performance. When it was over, the staff and students in the audience were invited to comment upon what they had just seen. James Michener, the author of many epic tomes, including Tales Of The South Pacific, made into the movie South Pacific, would single Wilson out. Though nearly 90, Michener was still sharp and teaching at the university. Wilson was inappropriately cast, he thought, indeed he didn't seem to know how to act at all.

Wilson would be further pushed towards acting when attending Shakespeare at Winedale, a University of Texas summer programme where students would spend two months studying and performing three Shakespeare plays in a 19th Century barn converted into a theatre out in the country. Over nine weeks they'd work 18 hour days to learn their roles and also the basics of set design, costume creation, all the ins and outs of theatre. At the end, all the great and the good from Austin would drive out to watch the performances. It was extremely prestigious and, in later years, the students would be invited to perform their plays both in London and Stratford. Wilson, however, couldn't get along with it at all. Cast as one of the leads in The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, he couldn't cope with so many lines and, utterly overwhelmed, he left the course, went home and duly received an F grade.

. Eventually, Wilson would leave the University of Texas without graduating. He'd move back to Dallas, rooming with Anderson in the Oak Lawn district. With Anderson dead-set on becoming a director, in 1990 they'd begin writing the script that would become Bottle Rocket. For cash, Wilson would work as a waiter at the S&D Oyster Company, a restaurant on McKinney Avenue where his parents were regular customers. While being shown the ropes he'd listen intently to the stories told by the owners and other waiters, tales from south Dallas he'd slip into his script (by way of thanks, several of his co-workers would end up with small parts in Bottle Rocket). Later, he'd work briefly at Hinckley's Cold Storage, a frozen food warehouse in the Fair Park area. Wilson had persuaded them he was a successful salesman. He wasn't, and would last just two weeks. It would not, however, be the last he saw of Hinckley's as he'd use the warehouse as the scene of the final, horribly botched robbery in Bottle Rocket.

Soon Wilson and Anderson had completed a black and white 8-minute short involving three Dallas guys, two of them being played by Wilson and his brother Luke, hoping to become professional crooks and robbing the people and places they know best. Prophetically opening with a discussion of Starsky and Hutch, the short would be seen by screen-writer LM "Kit" Carson, a friend of Wilson's family, who'd written Paris, Texas and Breathless and would help them secure finance to extend their film to 13 minutes. It would then be screened at Sundance in 1993. They'd now get in touch with producer Polly Platt, who'd been married to Peter Bogdanovich in his late Sixties glory years and later worked on Say Anything and Broadcast News. Platt would in turn gain the interest of James L Brooks, famed for such productions as Terms Of Endearment and The Simpsons. Anderson and the Wilson brothers had to fly to a meeting with Brooks. This was their chance, emotions were running high. Owen and Luke wound each other up to the extent that a fist-fight broke out. Tears were shed on the plane. Owen's face was a mess, but Brooks didn't mention it. He simply bankrolled them to the tune of $5 million. Now Bottle Rocket could be extended to feature length.

.

The film would begin with Luke Wilson in a mental institution. He's there voluntarily and can leave anytime he likes, but still goes along with his friend Dignan's plan to tie together his sheets and escape through the window. This sets the scene. Luke is a damaged romantic finding it hard to live in the real world. Owen's Dignan, on the other hand, is genuinely unbalanced, a super-optimist with a plan to become the next John Dillinger, for sheer joy firing the fireworks of the title out of the car window. Hugely conscientious in his plotting, he scrupulously draws maps of his targets, notes the comings and goings of his victims, just like they do in the movies. Starting out as small fry, he's keen to get hooked up with landscape gardener and minor mobster James Caan. But eventually he just hasn't got it in him. For all his research he's an enthusiastic amateur, obsessive, delusional, unable to cope when his plans are questioned or when Luke falls for a Latino chambermaid at a desert motel. Crew-cut, very youthful and with that now-famously wonky nose (he broke it once in a High School scuffle, then again playing football with friends), Owen was charming, needy, funny and disturbed, brilliantly conveying the idea that for his character the planning, the dreaming, the ambition is everything. Not even chaos, betrayal and abject failure can dent his high hopes.

. Bottle Rocket would see Wilson begin as he meant to go on, improvising like crazy. Deeply frustrated by every take being so radically different, his own brother Luke would demand to know why he couldn't for once stick to the script. He did, after all, write the damn thing. But Owen's quick mind was always working, always searching. He was essentially writing while he was acting, the words tumbling out unedited, with Anderson's help to be cut down and spliced together later.

With Anderson and Wilson having worked on the project now for over five years, they did not find it easy to cope with outside interference. Thus there were huge fights in the editing suite. There'd be more when producers informed them that Bottle Rocket had the worst test results in Columbia's history. Wilson would consider giving up on it all and joining the marines, but would instead decide to dip into a Hollywood career, in 1996 moving to Los Angeles, where he'd share a house with Anderson and brother Luke.

Columbia's lack of confidence in Bottle Rocket meant that the film would not be pushed, and thus it bombed. It had, however, been seen by the right people and Anderson and Wilson's stock was high. One person in particular had enjoyed their efforts, and had written to them to say so. This was Ben Stiller, himself in a similar position after his well-regarded TV show had been axed in 1993.

Stiller was trying to make a mark in Hollywood, and had agreed to direct the latest Jim Carrey comedy, The Cable Guy, where Matthew Broderick would be turned down for marriage by Leslie Mann, move into a bachelor pad and be stalked by a disturbed and dangerously needy Carrey. Stiller would hire Wilson to play Mann's new boyfriend, Wilson making him a memorably slimy and pompous jerk. Far darker than any of Carrey's previous output, the movie would not be the mega-hit the studio expected, but it would be very positive for Wilson, bringing him close to Stiller, and to some of Stiller's friends and colleagues, including Jack Black and Janeane Garofalo. He'd also get to know Judd Apatow, who'd produced Stiller's TV show and would go on to marry Leslie Mann and enjoy great success with The Larry Sanders Show and such movies as The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Apatow had done rewrites on The Cable Guy and wanted Wilson to star in his proposed next picture, Making Amends, where a guy in AA would attempt to apologise to everyone he's ever upset (this was some 10 years before the similarly themed hit TV show My Name Is Earl). Unfortunately, nothing would come of the project, as was the case with one of Wilson's other plans at the time. Though he knew Ed Harris had the rights to a biography of painter Jackson Pollock, Wilson would publicly state his interest in getting involved in the movie, as a writer. Again this would reveal the conflict within. Wilson wanted to be a high-minded writer, but he was being drawn into acting alongside the likes of Jim Carrey and Jack Black.

. The experiences on offer were just too good to miss, and Wilson would now take a role in the far-from-high-minded Anaconda, starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Jon Voight. Here a TV crew would set off to find and film a lost Amazonian tribe, Lopez leading the team, with Cube as cinematographer and Wilson as soundman. Along the way they pick up river rat Voight, a charismatic but sinister gentleman who has an ulterior and deadly motive for helping them on their way up the river. Wilson would this time play a horny, weasely little devil who sneaks into the jungle to get it on with production manager Kari Wuhrer (he'd actually begin seeing Wuhrer in real life, too) and is menaced by what we think must be a giant snake. As matters come to a head, he betrays his friends and through fear forms an alliance with Voight, holding up the crew at gunpoint. Eventually, though, his good nature wins through and he risks his life to save Wuhrer, getting crushed and eaten for his pains, the imprint of his face being visible through the anaconda's skin. As such he was a more heroic version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

Wilson's next picture would take him about as far as he could go from his artistic aspirations.

This was Armageddon, where an asteroid the size of Texas was speeding towards Earth and oil driller Bruce Willis had to lead a team into space, land on the offending rock and blow it to smithereens. Much like The Dirty Dozen, the team would be a motley crew, with Wilson playing an impulsive cowboy type, his improvisations this time having his character complain vociferously about musical dolts who believe Ian Anderson to be Jethro Tull. He clearly possessed a Tarantino-style ear for effective off-the-wall dialogue. Again his character would die an honourable death when crashing onto the asteroid, belying his seemingly frivolous nature by taking the heroic path. Armageddon would bring Wilson his first $100 million hit. Indeed, it would take over twice that in America.

. Away from the action-packed extravagance of Anaconda and Armageddon, Wilson was building a different kind of career. Sticking with Ben Stiller, he'd also appear in Permanent Midnight, based on the autobiography of Jerry Stahl, where Stiller would play a writer moving from New York to LA to escape an unproductively druggy lifestyle. Here he meets up with best buddy Wilson, stays at his place and together they zoom around town, popping pills and shooting the shit. Wilson would introduce Stiller to TV exec Elizabeth Hurley and some well-paid work, only for harder drugs to take a fearsome hold. It was an excellent movie, with fine performances from Stiller, Wilson and Maria Bello and, though Wilson's role was small, he made the most of his few scenes, convincingly giggling along with Stiller, frustrated when Stiller steals his drugs and pretends he hasn't, then jokingly covering up for his friend at a party when Stiller, believing himself to be threatened by an evil cartoon character, bursts from the toilet, makes a scene then spins back into the loo and begins to violently vomit. Again, Janeane Garofalo would also appear.

Being so heavy, Permanent Midnight would bomb at the box office, and Wilson would fare no better with his next effort alongside Stiller and his chums. This was 1999's Heat Vision And Jack, directed by Stiller and starring Jack Black, where Black would be an astronaut who, after an accident in space, is gifted with supreme intelligence when exposed to the sun. Wilson would play his room-mate, whose mind and body have been fused with a very cool motorbike, Black and his metallic buddy being tailed by evil NASA scientist Ron Silver. Intended as a pilot for a series that would spoof such earlier shows as Knight Rider, Heat Vision And Jack would see Black and his Wilson-voiced bike, aided by sheriff Christine Taylor, chase after a gas station owner who can melt people with his eyes. Unfortunately, it would not be taken up by Fox.

Nevertheless, Wilson was still on the up. Still working closely with Wes Anderson, he'd co-written a new screenplay, Rushmore, that was the subject of a industry-wide bidding war won by Disney's Touchstone Pictures.

Released in 1998, the same year as Armageddon and Permanent Midnight, this would see Jason Schwartzman as a precocious 15-year-old at the prestigious Rushmore Academy, manipulating both students and staff and then getting into a battle with rich alumnus Bill Murray for the love of teacher Olivia Williams. As ever with Anderson and Wilson, the film was a comedy with dark impulses, packed with ideas. Having Schwartzman as a hugely enthusiastic organiser of many school clubs brought many moments of humour, one coming when Schwartzman's acting troupe attempt an adaptation of Serpico. Also featuring would be Brian Cox, as the school's put-upon headmaster, as well as Luke and Andrew Wilson, and Connie Nielsen, who'd revelled in pervy sex with Ben Stiller in Permanent Midnight. Clearly Wilson's years at St Mark's were at last being utilized. The movie would not be a big hit, but it was again very well-received, Anderson and Wilson maintaining their reputation as the brightest new kids on the block. At the time they had several scripts on the go, one being a comic western titled Black Irish. Wilson would soon enjoy success with a comic western of a very different sort.

. At this point Wilson was in an immensely strong position, having won great critical kudos as writer of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and made an acting mark with flashy roles in Anaconda and Armageddon. His ongoing working relationships with Wes Anderson and Ben Stiller looked like they might well bear further fruit, too. His next film, though, his first outright headliner, would take him away from both comedy and action. This was The Minus Man, based on the novel by Lew McCreary, where Wilson would play an ordinarily amiable drifter with a twisted God complex, who befriends strangers and, given the chance, poisons them, covering his tracks with grim efficiency. Having killed junkie Sheryl Crow and left her body in a roadside toilet (Wilson would actually date Crow for a couple of years), he arrives in a new town where he finds lodging in the home of Mercedes Ruehl and Rushmore's Brian Cox. They've lost their daughter, Cox is drinking heavily and their marriage is cracking, Wilson using their vulnerability to inveigle his way into their affections as he uses their home as a base while he trawls the bars and cafes of local towns, seeking new victims. He charms everyone, but relates to no one on a normal emotional level, his weird self-justifying voiceover showing him to be a man on an unintelligible mission. Those unfortunates who find themselves alone with him, away from safety, he believes to have been given to him. It was a fascinating psychological study, with Wilson brilliant as a man who empathises only in order to get close enough to kill. He was especially good in his dealings with former co-star Janeane Garofalo, a colleague at the post office who fancies him.

She's a gift, for sure, but he doesn't want her, or anyone else sexually, and he can't kill her as he has a rule forbidding him from killing in the place where he's living, thereby attracting attention. Still, knowing none of this, she persists, and when she finally tries to get physical his reaction is terrifying; it's a shocking snapshot of the damaged person he really is.

. The Minus Man was a excellent film, but very few went to see it. Even fewer would witness his next appearance, in Alan Rudolph's Breakfast Of Champions. Based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, this would see Armageddon star Bruce Willis as a big shot in a small town, a car salesman who stars in his own TV ads. Everyone knows him, everyone likes him, he had a beautiful wife in Barbara Hershey and a pneumatic mistress in secretary Glenne Headly, but still he's deeply dissatisfied and indeed begins to lose his mind. The only person who can save him, he feels, is Kilgore Trout, played by Albert Finney, an unknown and embittered sci fi novelist who's been invited to the town's annual arts festival. Willis would come to believe Finney holds the secret of life while having vigorous sex with Headly in a hotel room, his thoughts being influenced by a show on the TV playing in the corner. The show features Wilson, in a crazy white wig and bow-tie, as a smarmy host discussing Finney's power as a writer and philosopher. This was Wilson's only scene, but it was appropriately intense and zany, the whole film being fraught, playful and generally out on a limb. As said, it made no impact at the box office whatsoever.

Wilson's final movie of 1999 would turn a slight profit, despite being less intense than Breakfast Of Champions and less frightening than The Minus Man. This was The Haunting, a thoroughly unnecessary remake of Robert Wise's 1963 original. Here Liam Neeson would play a psychology professor who brings a troubled Lili Taylor, a frisky Catherine Zeta-Jones and a cocky Wilson to Hill House to carry out experiments involving sleep disorder. Or so he says. In fact, Hill House is reportedly haunted and Neeson wishes to use them as guinea pigs as he delves into the mechanics of fear. Wilson would play a cynical veteran of paid experiments, where in the original the cynical young man, Russ Tamblyn, had been the heir to the possessed pile. This new version, despite outstanding set design, was weak throughout. Wilson's death - he has his head bitten off by a stone lion in a walk-in fireplace - was absurd, and the final hellish confrontation laughable. Some films, like some houses, are best left alone.

Nevertheless, Wilson would enter the new millennium with a bang. His first picture of the new century would be the aforementioned comic western, Shanghai Noon, co-starring Jackie Chan, then huge in America after the success of Rush Hour. Set in 1881, the film would see a Chinese princess escape an arranged marriage by fleeing to America, where she's kidnapped by villains in Nevada.

The Imperial Guard would be sent to save her, with Chan as baggage carrier, but events would soon see Chan team up with train robber Wilson to lead the rescue attempt. It was hilarious stuff, with Wilson brilliant in his very modern take on a western bandit, his Roy O'Bannon being a motor-mouthed surfer dude, a gambler, a drinker, a cheat and a womaniser, obsessed with looking cool. His verbal pyrotechnics would match Chan's outrageous physical stunts, making Shanghai Noon a top-class buddy movie and a worldwide hit. Wilson was fast becoming a bona fide star.

. His next feature, also from 2000, would be a monster hit. This would be Meet The Parents, starring his friend Ben Stiller, an update of Greg Glienna's 1991 comedy featuring Emo Phillips. Here Stiller would play a male nurse, in love with Teri Polo, who must visit her family, a family headed by Robert De Niro's deeply suspicious ex-CIA agent. Stiller's tiny white lies are horribly magnified, minor accidents have terrible consequences, everything that can go wrong does. And then there's Wilson, Polo's perfect ex and the apple of De Niro's eye. He's kind, sensitive, rich, generous, well-travelled, tasteful and artistic. He makes gigantic and beautiful sculptures out of driftwood and has arranged the garden party for the wedding of Polo's sister, having built the altar and pagodas himself. His character was intended simply to make Stiller's feel even worse, but Wilson added that little bit extra, his Kevin bearing up bravely after losing Polo, but sometimes teetering on the edge of darker emotions. You'd expect no less from the writer of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. Meet The Parents would take $166 million at the US box office. Along with 1998's There's Something About Mary it would make Stiller one of America's top screen comedians, allowing him to pick and choose his projects, projects that would near-inevitably involve Wilson.

Having lent his voice to an episode of King Of The Hill where he played a 22-year-old virgin snapped up by Brittany Murphy's Luanne, Wilson would move straight into Stiller's next picture, Zoolander. This was based on a character Stiller had invented for the VH1 Fashion Award back in 1996, a male model of profound ambition and incomparable stupidity. Here Stiller's Derek Zoolander would be brainwashed by evil designer Will Ferrell and programmed to murder the prime minister of Malaysia, a politician about to ban child labour. In the course of this silliness, Zoolander would have to confront his latest catwalk rival, Wilson, a New Age hippy with a fine line in martial arts gestures and cosmic gobbledegook. Their face-off, where each tries to out-pose the other, was a thing of foolish wonder, Wilson more than holding his own despite lacking any dance experience. Of course, the two models would then make friends, bonding over a naked Christina Applegate, and take on Ferrell together. It would be another hit for Stiller and Wilson.

Also featuring would be two former Wilson co-stars, Jon Voight and Christine Taylor.

. Roles would now be reversed as Stiller took a role in The Royal Tenenbaums, the latest movie to be written by Wilson with Wes Anderson. This would concern the fraught and bizarre relationships between a family of former prodigies living in a big house in New York. Stiller would be a former financial whizzkid, Gwyneth Paltrow a former young playwright now married to bearded intellectual Bill Murra, and Luke Wilson a child tennis star, all of them uptight and hiding secrets and all of them living with mother Anjelica Huston now that patriarch Gene Hackman has left. Now Hackman returns, claiming he has cancer, seeking forgiveness and leading his grandchildren into shoplifting and dangerous escapades in an attempt to teach them to live full lives away from the suffocation of the household. Wilson would play brother Luke's best friend, an author who dreams of artistic renown but makes his money from successful pulp westerns. Living across the street, he's an informal family member, and a druggie, denying his need for rehab till he runs over the family dog. It was a comedy but, as ever with Anderson and Wilson, it was a well-written character piece with sharp edges. And, not only would it be a hit, it would also earn Anderson and Wilson an Oscar nomination for their screenplay, as well as a BAFTA nomination. It was due reward for Wilson. He and his brother Luke had been set to play the Malloy brothers in the predictable hit Ocean's Eleven but had turned it down to do The Royal Tenenbaums (their places being taken by Casey Affleck and Scott Caan, son of James, their co-star in Bottle Rocket).

Wilson's next release would see him return to action. This was Behind Enemy Lines, starring Gene Hackman and shot before The Royal Tenenbaums. Hackman had seen Wilson in Shanghai Noon and recommended him for the part and, during filming, Wilson had persuaded Hackman to appear in The Royal Tenenbaums. Behind Enemy Lines would see Wilson as a hot-shot fighter pilot, seeking real action and complaining when he's sent on recon missions over war-torn Bosnia. Straying from his intended flight-path, he spots a mass grave and illegal Serbian troop movements and is shot down, having to escape across country while being trailed by troops and an expert tracker. Somehow he manages to avoid tanks, machine guns and rifle fire while Hackman, held back by a French-led NATO, tries to organise his rescue. It was profoundly unrealistic, but another hit nevertheless.

Wilson was on an amazing run of hits, a run that would end with 2002's I Spy. This was an update of the hit Sixties TV series, with Eddie Murphy taking Robert Culp's sporty role and Wilson Bill Cosby's, Murphy playing a prizefighter recruited by Wilson's agent to help steal an invisible plane back from criminal mastermind Malcolm McDowell. So, off they go to Budapest, using a big fight as cover. Of course, Murphy would be the comedian of the pair, helping the clumsy but smart and resourceful Wilson win the heart of mysterious operative Famke Janseen. It was tame stuff, at its best when Murphy and Wilson were permitted to riff, and would bomb at the box office.

Aside from a brief appearance in the video to Johnny Cash's God's Gonna Cut You Down (he's to be seen right at the end, flinging a bouquet of flowers), Wilson's only release of 2003 would see him return to Jackie Chan for Shanghai Knights, a sequel to their hit from three years earlier. Here the Great Seal of China would be stolen and its guardian, Chan's father, killed. Now sheriff of Carson City, Chan would race to New York to team up with old buddy Wilson, and the pair would then take off for London, where they'd face Victorian strictures, Jack the Ripper and a plot to assassinate the Royal Family. The action would be upped from the original, with Chan doing a Harold Lloyd on Big Ben, and Wilson and Chan would retain their comic chemistry, the film being another big worldwide hit. Not so successful would be Wilson's next feature, The Big Bounce, based on the writings of Elmore Leonard and originally filmed in 1969, that movie giving Ryan O'Neal his first lead role. Now set on Hawaii, the movie would see Wilson as a drifter, petty crook and, as in Bottle Rocket, a nerveless burglar. He's working as a skivvy on a new development being raised, amidst protests, on holy ground, whacks bullying overseer Vinnie Jones with a baseball bat and goes up before judge Morgan Freeman. Freeman likes him, though, and not only lets him off but employs him as caretaker at his complex of beach apartments. Here Wilson comes under the spell of Sara Foster, a manipulative temptress who's seeing both big businessman Gary Sinise and his dopey head honcho Charlie Sheen and is planning to steal $200,000 Sinise has lined up to pay the Mob to avoid union action. Soon Wilson's in too deep, everyone's in too deep, as the double-crossings and secret machinations gather pace. It was a knockabout affair and, lacking any real threat to its main protagonists, it fell far behind such Leonard adaptations as Get Shorty and Out Of Sight. It also wasted an incredible amount of time on tourist board shots of surfers and paradisaical landscapes., suffering a terrible if deserved fate at the box office where it took just $6 million on a $50 million budget. It would not be the only disaster to which Wilson was attached in 2004.

First, he'd reunite with Ben Stiller for Starsky And Hutch, a film adaptation of the Seventies TV series he'd bantered about at the beginning of Bottle Rocket. As said, he'd already appeared in several films with Stiller. This time, though, they'd be bona fide co-stars, proper buddies. Stiller would be the super-tense Starsky, manic, obsessed with correct procedure and thoroughly disapproving of his new partner Wilson's lackadaisical and often illegal approach. Hutch, it seems, is not averse to petty crime, even emptying the wallet of a body they find washed up. On the trail of the killers, they pick up two cheerleaders, Carmen Electra and Amy Smart, both of whom succumb to Wilson's charms. They'd also visit a biker bar and a high security prison where they question a hilariously weird Will Ferrell, who'll only divulge information if Wilson shows him his belly-button then arches his back and snarls like a dragon. Wilson's face was a picture of quietly sickened humiliation. Soon they find themselves up against smooth and vicious drugs dealer Vince Vaughn, who the year before had starred alongside Ferrell and Luke Wilson in Old School. (It was Old School that would see Vaughn, Ferrell and Luke Wilson, alongside with their buddies Stiller, Jack Black and Owen Wilson, dubbed the Frat Pack). As Hutch, Owen Wilson would play it relatively straight, more a street guy than a surfer dude, and his pairing with Stiller would work well, the duo jawing as successfully as they had in Permanent Midnight. The film would be another big hit.

. This could not be said of Wilson's next picture, a remake of Around The World In 80 Days that saw him reunite with Jackie Chan. Here Steve Coogan would play the hero Phileas Fogg, attempting the rapid circumnavigation of the title, with Chan as his Passepartout. Alongside the way they'd meet many dangers and several cinematic celebrities, Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a decadent Turkish prince, and Wilson appearing alongside his brother Luke as Wilbur and Orville Wright, giving Coogan plans for an aircraft that he later builds from a dismantled ship. Though great fun, the movie did not grab the public's imagination, bringing in just $24 million on a $110 million budget. Faring little better would be Wilson's latest with Wes Anderson, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou., the first film Anderson had written without Wilson, teaming instead with Noah Baumbach. Here Bill Murray, who'd earlier appeared in both Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, would play the oceanographer of the title, off on a mission to kill the jaguar shark that ate his partner and film the hunt as he goes along. Mother Tenenbaum Anjelica Huston would be Murray's business partner, with Willem Dafoe and Michael Gambon forming part of the crew, journalist Cate Blanchett coming along for the ride. Wilson would appear as a young southern pilot who joins and part-finances the expedition.

Believing Murray may be his father, he gradually forms a relationship with the older man, a relationship both of them need but that's complicated by a form of love triangle involving Blanchett. Yet again, Wilson would die violently, this time crashing into the sea. It was a slow and quiet comedy-drama, not really a success for anyone involved. Wilson would finish 2004 with a short cameo at the end of Meet The Fockers, the follow-up to Meet The Parents, that would see Ben Stiller take his intended and her folks to visit his parents, out-there hippy couple Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. It was tremendously crude but still a giant hit, taking nearly $280 million at the US box office.

. Wilson's two releases of 2005 would be very different in terms of scope and intent. The first would be The Wendell Baker Story, written by his brother Luke and directed both by Luke and older brother Andrew. Like Bottle Rocket, this was a loose, character-driven comedy, where Luke Wilson would play an ever-optimistic con artist busted and jailed for selling fake documents to illegal immigrants. While inside, he learns the rudiments of hotel management and, upon his release, discovering that his partner in crime has gone straight and girlfriend Eva Mendes has left him for a very angry Will Ferrell, he gets a job at a retirement hotel. Here he plots the downfall of brother Owen, a tyrant of a head nurse, a pill-popping, creepy and downright cruel fellow abusing and ripping off the oldies left right and centre. It was an idiosyncratic and very enjoyable comedy, but suffered a very limited release once its financiers had gone bust and were forced to sell on the rights. Never in difficulty was Wilson's other film of 2005, Wedding Crashers, which saw him back with his Frat Pack cohort Vince Vaughn, as well as Will Ferrell and Shanghai Knights director David Dobkin. This would see Wilson and Vaughn as old friends who've perfected the art of, yes, crashing weddings, scoring free food, drink and girls of all nationalities and religions. Their aim is to attend the nuptials of the daughter of Treasury Secretary Christopher Walken and, in the course of their efforts, Wilson falls for the daughter, Rachel McAdams while Vaughn is latched onto by her crazy younger sister Isla Fisher, as well as her gay brother. Understandably, given the situation, it was Vaughn that found himself in all the scrapes and consequently delivered most of the killer lines, with Wilson spending much of the film as a straight romantic lead. Still, the pair worked well together and Wedding Crashers proved astoundingly successful, even breaking the $200 million barrier at the box office.

2006 would be another successful year for Wilson. He'd begin it by lending his voice to a vehicle, as he had done in Heat Vision And Jack back in 1999. Here, in Pixar's animated Cars, he'd be a flashy, arrogant speedster, lost in the desert on his way to the big race.

Stumbling on a small town, he'd be frustrated by having to perform community service, tempted by Bonnie Hunt's sexy Porshe and schooled by Paul Newman's former champion, a Hudson Hornet, learning both humility and the best way to win. It would be another massive hit, the fourth Wilson release to pass $200 million, and also spawn the short Master And The Ghostlight. He'd follow it with another smash, this time the comedy You, Me And Dupree, where he'd play a carefree and irresponsible bum who, having lost his job and his home, is put up by his best mate Matt Dillon and Dillon's new bride, Kate Hudson. Hardly house-trained, wandering around naked and organising beer-sodden football nights with his pals, he's an annoyance for Hudson and an embarrassment for Dillon, getting into further trouble when Hudson sets him up with a promiscuous librarian. However, he's not simply an animal, proving himself to be poetic, needy, self-destructive, and also wily and organised when he helps Dillon get back at his disapproving property developer father-in-law Michael Douglas. One of many comic moments would come when Wilson engages in a frenetic duel and chase with a huge Samoan security guard. Following this would come another effort with Ben Stiller, Night At The Museum, where Stiller, split from his wife and fearing he'll lose his son, takes a job as night watchman at New York's Museum of Natural History. At sundown, though, things get weird, with all the exhibits coming alive. Thus Stiller finds himself chatting with Robin Williams' Theodore Roosevelt and pursued by Attila the Hun, some lions and the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus. He also finds himself captured by Wilson's Jedediah, a miniature cowboy warring with the legions of general Octavius, played by Steve Coogan, who Wilson had aided in Around The World In 80 Days. It was only a bit part, but Wilson stood out once again, being a fiery go-getter, comically resentful at being looked down upon. Yet again a Wilson movie would smash the $200 million mark.

. Wilson's private life was now becoming difficult, aside from the aforementioned Kari Wuhrer and Sheryl Crow, he'd been attached to Gina Gershon, Demi Moore, dancer Carolina Carisola and many others, the tabloids dubbing him The Butterscotch Stallion. During the filming of You, Me And Dupree, there were rumours that he'd begun an affair with the married Kate Hudson, rumours strenuously denied by both parties. However, when in 2006 Hudson did split from her husband, Black Crowes rocker Chris Robinson, she would begin to date Wilson, a relationship that would end in May, 2007. Wilson had occasionally bemoaned his inability to concentrate on relationships, but now he was in a bad way. On August 26th he'd be found at home by his brother Andrew. It was said that he'd slashed his wrists and taken an overdose of pills. He'd be rushed to St John's Hospital in Santa Monica then, when stabilized, moved to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre.

His lawyer, though giving little away, would state that Wilson had been undergoing treatment for depression at the time. Wilson would withdraw from Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, being replaced by Matthew McConaughey. To anyone who didn't already know, it was now evident that Wilson was far from the supremely casual surfer type of Zoolander or Shanghai Noon. He was actually an angst-ridden worrier, well able to quote Samuel Beckett. It was long considered of his writing partnership with Wes Anderson that Anderson was the intellectual dramatist and Wilson the comedian. In fact, it was more 50/50 though, as Wilson would once explain, Anderson would always get a minor final edit as he was the only one of the two that could type.

. Wilson's one movie of 2007 would be the far more modest The Darjeeling Limited, again written and directed by his old college room-mate Anderson, and also featuring such stalwart colleagues as Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston and Jason Schwartzman. The film would see Wilson, badly hurt in a motorcycle crash (maybe a suicide attempt) and heavily bruised and bandaged, persuade his brothers Schwartzman and Adrien Brody to accompany him on a trip to India to seek enlightenment (though he has another secret motive). Thus they take off on a long train journey with their piles of expensive luggage, visiting holy sites, accidentally taking drugs, getting trapped by monkeys, then moving deep into the subcontinental heartland, their pasts, their characters and their futures becoming ever clearer as they chatter, argue and confess. It was a meandering movie, but complex, human and rewarding, Anderson claiming that it was perhaps his and Wilson's most personal movie to date. Far less complicated would be 2008's Drillbit Taylor, the latest from the Judd Apatow school, being written by Kristofer Brown and Seth Rogen (Apatow himself having written The Cable Guy 12 years earlier). Based on an old idea by John Hughes, this would see a trio of teenage geeks get on the wrong side of a bully on their first day at High School. After taking a week of punishment, they decide to hire a bodyguard and, due to a lack of finances, are forced to employ Wilson, a homeless guy addicted to scratch cards, who convinces them that as an ex-military man he's up for the job. Actually a deep-down coward and only after their money so he can make a break for Canada, he proves useless, but then, pricked by conscience, he has a change of heart and tries to help them give the bullies their comeuppance, a turnaround much like his character's in Anaconda. Like The Darjeeling Limited, Drillbit Taylor would not make its money back at the box office.

Despite Drillbit Taylor, 2008 would still be good for Wilson, the end of the year seeing the release of Marley & Me. Based on the 2005 bestseller by John Grogan, this would see Wilson and Jennifer Aniston as a cute young couple, both journalists, in a new home, with new jobs and looking to start a family.

Naturally, they get a dog, a dog that turns out to be naughty, neurotic and endlessly mischievous, causing chaos over the next decade or so as Wilson and Aniston produce a string of kids. It was excellent family fare, with Wilson and Aniston being funny and realistically smart and pressured, and would be a major hit, taking over $140 million. It was clear that, after his giant successes with Aniston, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jackie Chan, Wilson worked exceptionally well with an onscreen partner. His next picture would see him back with Ben Stiller and Steve Coogan for a sequel to Night At The Museum, titled Battle Of The Smithsonian, where Wilson's crazy cowboy and Coogan's Roman general would be shipped to the wrong museum and Stiller would have to break in to rescue them. A new cast of historical characters would be there to aid and plague them, including Al Capone, Abraham Lincoln and Amelia Earhart.

. Though his image has been coloured by his success with the Frat Pack as a screen comedian, Owen Wilson is evidently one of Hollywood's more versatile and well-rounded talents. He's a great comedian, for sure, but his work in The Minus Man and his collaborations with Wes Anderson have shown him to be an actor of some substance. He's also shown himself to be a fine writer, with an Oscar nomination to prove it. A long and extremely fruitful career is surely his for the taking.

Dominic Wills