Confessions of George Clooney George Clooney with girlfriend Stacy Keibler at the Golden Globes in Hollywood last month Clooney, seen here...

Confessions of George Clooney

George Clooney with girlfriend Stacy Keibler at the Golden Globes in Hollywood last month

Clooney, seen here with pal Brad Pitt, says he can feel the most lonely at a big public event

Seen here last year with former flame Elisabetta Canalis

Clooney in his hotly-tipped Academy Award film The Descendants

He is the last Hollywood playboy, a debonair movie star with a cast of famous friends and a succession of beautiful women on his arm.

With two Oscar nominations this year alone, George Clooney seems like he has it all.

But the 50-year-old actor reveals in a new interview that he suffers from bouts of loneliness, lives with chronic pain and has trouble sleeping.

‘Gorgeous’ George even confesses to being cheated on – and dumped.

The private agony of Tinseltown’s most eligible bachelor is revealed in a lengthy, soul-searching interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the ‘bible’ of the film industry in the US.

Far from his image as a jet-setting superstar, Clooney says he’s in bed most nights by 10pm.

But he relies on the flickering of the TV to doze off and wakes up often throughout the night.

‘Turning off the television causes me to think, and once I start that vision roaring, I have a very tough time getting to sleep,’ he admits. ‘I’m able to numb out.’

But he adds: ‘Without question, I wake every night five times.’

Although he is seen as the leader of a modern-day ‘Brat Pack’ with friends like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon, Clooney said he also suffers from loneliness.

‘Anyone would be lying if they said they didn’t get lonely at times,’ he says.

‘The loneliest you will get is in the most public of arenas: You will go to a place and end up in the smallest compartment possible, because it’s a distraction to everybody, and you end up not getting to enjoy it like everyone else.’

He adds: ‘I have been infinitely more alone in a bad relationship; there’s nothing more isolating. I have been in places in my life where that has existed.’

He is famously averse to marriage and every break-up comes with accusations that he’s afraid of commitment, but Clooney insists he hasn’t ruled out marriage.

‘A couple of years ago, [Brad Pitt] really nailed me. He did one of those shows and they asked him when he was going to marry Angie [Angelina Jolie], and he said, ‘I’ll marry when George can legally marry [a man].’ He adds: ‘He really got me badly, something I have had to deal with the past few years. But I could give a s***.’

He’s friends with Pitt, calling him ‘one of the great guys,’ but he adds: ‘It’s different from what people think, meaning we don’t spend a lot of time together. He has been to my home in Como; we motorcycle together. But until recently, I hadn’t seen Brad in a year.’

Clooney refuses to discuss his current relationship with statuesque former wrestler Stacy Keibler.

Most surprising to his many female fans may be that Cooney has been the victim of infidelity.

He said he’d been ditched ‘and left for someone; all those things. And it was sometimes a surprise, and sometimes you saw it coming. The most painful was when I kept trying to get (one woman) back. But we all make dumb mistakes.’

The normally taboo subjects of drink and drugs even came up in the interview, appearing in the Reporter’s latest issue.

He says he hasn’t had a drink since New Year’s Eve.

‘I drink at times too much,’ he acknowledges. ‘I do enjoy drinking, and there have been times in my life when it’s crossed the line from being fun to having to drink late at night for absolutely no reason. So what I do is, I stop.’

He admits he’s sampled cocaine. ‘I didn’t have an issue with it. I’m not a big druggie, not at all. Blow is absolutely a nonstarter,’ he adds.

The actor has spoken before about the pain he suffered from a leak in his spinal cord that was so intense he contemplated suicide. ‘I thought I was going to die,’ he says of the consequences of a fall when he was filming ‘Syriana’ in 2005.

'I thought I’d had a stroke. It was like a train horn going off in your head and you can’t see and you can’t stand,’ he says.

After a nine-hour surgery, he said he was put on a regimen of prescription drugs.