Here's his problem: He works too much for not enough money and never has enough free time. (Sound familiar?) Sure, Ewan McGregor's making decent money. But it's not Harrison ord or Jim Carrey kind of change. And he's working so much, in the last two years alone, he's been in 11 films. "It's dreadful," McGregor says, while letting you know he doesn't really mean it. "I guess I'm just an actor who can't say no. Every time I try to take a few months off, someone hands me a script that I think is too good to pass up. " It sort of runs in the family. McGregor was born and raised in rural Crieff, Scotland. His father was a boarding school gym teacher and he had an uncle who acted for a living. To the young McGregor, his uncle, Dennis Lawson, was this impossibly eccentric and glamorous figure who would show up to family gatherings in the country dressed in beads and sheepskin waistcoats.

Although he wasn't quite sure what actors actually did for a living, it sure looked good from his side of the screen. It looked even better when Uncle Dennis showed up behind the wheel of a starfighter in the original Star Wars. Lawson was rebel X-wing fighter pilot Wedge Antilles and actually managed to make it through all three of the first Star Wars series by virtue of being a minor character. "I grew up on Star Wars," says McGregor. "They were completely engrossing. When you watch them as a child, they take over. Plus, my uncle was in all three. I remember the excitement of going to see the first film when I was five or six, initially to see him. But, at that age, the whole thing just blew my hair back. What's great is that, if this works out, my daughter will be five or six by the time this batch comes out. It'll be great for her to have her daddy in it, you know." Oh yes, we haven't mentioned yet that McGregor plays the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace-like we have to. If you don't know this by now you're either a monk or under that proverbial rock.

Here is how Obi-Wan Kenobi Jr. shows up at the local pub: black jeans, Adidas sneakers, and a sweaty T-shirt with some Japanese writing. Diesel sunglasses rest on top of his spiky haircut. Squint hard and you might be able to imagine his twenty-six pounds lighter, as the heroin addict Renton in Trainspotting (he lost the weight by giving up drinking for two months). But stare right at him and he might be anyone--the guy from the realtor's office around the corner, a humanities graduate student, an actor--anyone. In person, he's less than iconic. On-screen, he turns that anonymity into startling versatility. At age twenty-six, Ewan has compiles a resume of dozens of characters. If you haven't seen him in Trainspotting, maybe you caught him looking less gaunt as a French-horn player in Brassed Off or a hapless thief holding Nurse Hathaway hostage in a convenience store on ER. You might even have watched him play a cleverdick newspaper reporter in Shallow Grave, a London dandy in Emma, or acalligraphy canvas in The Pillow Book.

But you may not know about the child. Her name is Clara and she was born in February, 1996, to McGregor and his wife, French production designer and writer, Eve Mouvrakis. McGregor first met his bride to be when he played a rapist on the British TV drama, Kavanagh QC. They were married in a borrowed villa in rural France after a week-long party. (McGregor took his vows in French, a language he doesn't really understand so that when everyone laughed after he said "oui," he thought he'd missed his cue.) This week-long pre-nuptial bacchanal is a trademark of McGregor's style. He's been known to hoist a pint or three. To drop 26 pounds to play the skinny heroin addicted Renton in Trainspotting all he had to do was quit drinking for two months. It was Trainspotting that really put McGregor on the map of the stars. Before that, the director/producer/ writer trio of Danny Boyle, Andrew MacDonald and John Hodge cast him in Shallow Grave, a macabre thriller that became a big hit.

The same group got back together for Trainspotting, which was an enormous success in Britain and abroad. They re-united more recently in America for the less successful A Life Less Ordinary with Cameron Diaz. Perhaps one of his most notorious roles is the one he took for Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book, which required him to show the Full Monty. "It's ultimately more embarrassing for everyone else on the set," McGregor says about his Pillow Book nudity, where he played a bisexual who likes to have calligraphy drawn on his body. "They're all trying desperatetly not to look. But it's very pleasant being painted on, quite nice." McGregor's parents are fond of gathering friend together and heading down to the local theatre to take in their son's latest movie. Their favorites are Trainspotting and Brassed Off, but when Pillow Book was released in Scotland, McGregor found it necessary to warn his parents that they might want to leave the friends behind. It prompted a post-viewing fax from his father who wrote: "I'm glad to see you've inherited one of my major assets."

For his latest outing in Star Wars: Episode I , no parental warnings will be required. As to why the notoriously Hollywood-shy took on the role, he says: "You can't say no, can you, if they ask you to do it. It's to be part of a legend, to be part of a modern myth. Tehre's nothing cooler than being a Jedi Knight. And to see yourself in space, that's amazing." It was also amazing the day McGregor got to select his own lightsaber handle. "This guy looked me in the eye, and said, 'Are you ready?" Then he opened up a briefcase sized box with eight or nine lightsaber handles," he says. "I picked the sexiest one. I realized I'd been waiting 20 years to have my own lightsaber." Now the wait is finally over and McGregor might even take a break from his hectic schedule after Star Wars is finally released into theatres- but don't bet on it. "I'm very much aware of the extraordinary position I'm in," he says, "to be working, making films that I am passionate about with very interesting filmakers. It's as good as it gets. I'm not smug about that. But I also didn't get into acting to be unemployed. I really should take a holiday, I know, but for me, there's nothing better than arriving on a film set in the morning and just being someone new. I'm sure I'll be able to work all this out with a therapist in later years, but for now, making movies is just too much fun to stop and think about it."