biography

In the Sixties and Seventies Clint Eastwood seemed too goodto be true. He transformedhimself overnight from a smilingcowboy in a TV series into adeadly, inscrutable fantasy heroidolized by millions. Whateverhe touched turned to gold, andso the biggest star in the worldalso became a highly successfuldirector - and his popularitynever diminishes

Clint Eastwood 1970s Japanese Stickers

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There was an unexpected box-office lapse inthe summer of 1980 - Bronco Billy didn't dovery well. It should have been reliable businesswith Clint Eastwood's brushed leather face beneath a dashing white cowboy hat. He wassurrounded by the people from previous hits.His deadpan reaction to mishap was funny,without destroying his authority. Bronco Billy had the air of a happy summer movie, as full offights, laughs and male self-congratulation as Every Which Way But Loose (1978), the Eastwood Christmas film of two years before and ahit beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The latterwas a departure: it was the first Eastwood filmto try comedy action, as if to say, 'Look, thisguy is 48, and he can't go around stomping oneveryone for much longer'. It gave Clint anorang-utan to tuck under one arm, while theother retained its gentlemanly hold on SondraLocke. The successful formula was repeatedwith Any Which Way You Can (1980), but Bronco Billy had been the first film to raise thepossibility that Eastwood is not infallible.




The Man With Few Failures

He continued to enjoy unrivalled success atthe box-office throughout the 1970s. Not every picture triumphed -one of the best, The Beguiled (1971), was toosardonic to please his following - but they allwent about their business of entertaining largeaudiences. For four decades, Eastwood's films have mostly been successful, eventhough critics such as Pauline Kael werealarmed by what they felt lay beneath thesurface of such violent cop movies as DirtyHarry (1971). Eastwood himself was quiet,unstarry and inclined to stay at home atCarmel, California, rather than play the talkshows. With an occassional sortie into localpolitics, he had gone from being actor to star todirector and boss of his own company,Malpaso. That tight-knit operation took bigprofits from his popular pictures.

No-one has ever begrudged him this glory.He handles himself gracefully, especially because he has acted on the notion that turningout pleasant movies is not that difficult. Hispictures are not expensive and they neverstrive after the difficult or the pretentious.In the 1950s he was a good-lookingCalifornian kid with hair like James Dean's andswimming-pool blue eyes. He would lookbetter as he matured, but if it hadn't been forthe shyness of someone who had reached sixfoot by the age of 13, he might have carriedshowbiz on the strength of beauty alone. Notsince Gary Cooper had an American male inpictures had it in his power to stop the breathof men and women in the audience alike. Nomatter how tough the roles, the skin, the eyesand the very soft voice have hinted at a MalibuApollo.




For a very few dollars . . .

He was born in San Francisco in 1930. Thefamily was poor and Clint went from highschool to manual labour, laying down thebasis for that lean body. He was an armyswimming instructor at Ford Ord, and then hestarted to study business at Los Angeles College. But physique and looks earned him offersfrom Universal - a starting contract at $75 aweek. In 1955, he got a couple of walk-on partsin movies, including Francis in the Navy, starring Donald O'Connor and a talking mule.

Those were tough days. Clint looked toohealthy and he spoke too clearly to fit theBrando style. He was in and out of work, taking acting classes by night and doinglabouring jobs in the day. The body got harder,but he didn't put much faith in lessons ortheory:

'The basic fundamental of learning acting isto know yourself, know what you can do.That's one big advantage of doing a series, ifyou can. You get to see yourself a lot, get to see what you can do wrong or right.'

His television series was Rawhide, and therole of Rowdy Yates was no more than anoutline that a young actor could inhabit infront of the camera. Over two hundred episodes in seven seasons provided Eastwood with that necessary view of himself. Now he is one offew screen stars with the instinctive assuranceof knowing how a scene should be filmed. Hisface, his minimal reactions and his timing area style such as Cooper and Bogart hadpossessed before him.

Even on Rawhide, he was asking to directsome episodes. Eric Fleming, the lead staron the show, had no problems with Clint'sambitions. But CBS and the unions were verytouchy and they restricted him to trailers. Still,it is a mark of Eastwood's love of movies thatthe urge to make them came early, apparentlyon a day when a stampede scene was beingshot from a safe distance and Clint wonderedwhy he couldn't carry a camera on horsebackinto the herd.

He could have been numbered with JamesArness, Robert Horton or, indeed, Eric Fleming - stars in Western series who retired, gottrapped in television, or in the case Fleming,died in 1966 on the slide. Clint proved hisinitiative with what seemed an affront toHollywood tradition. He went to Spain to makea Western for an Italian director. It was called Per un Pugno di Dollari (1964, A Fistful ofDollars) and he did it for S15.000: if the 'spaghetti' Western had proved cold and greasy the actor would have been thrown out in the garbage.




Leone and the language of death

However, the film was a huge, international hit that changed Eastwood's life and, in the Man With No Name, created a role model that still works in TV advertising. The film was made by Sergio Leone, whose English was as limited as Clint's Italian. But they got on well and understood that the image of a laconic but lethal man musing on a cheroot until blazing guns appeared from beneath his serape, could be sensational.

The costume was bought by Eastwood in America. He conceived the character, and he rewrote or cut many of his lines. A Fistful of Dollars and its sequels - Per Qualche Dollaro in Piu (1966, For a Few Dollars More) and Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo (1967, The Good, theBad and the Ugly) - were full of pregnant pausesjust because of the language problem on set,but that only stimulated Leone's visual imagination and allowed Clint to become an awesome assassin, above words, a face alwaysgazing into the sun so that the eyes seemed tobe glints of some rare and impervious metal. Aruthless, implacable honour grew around thesilence and the eyes that would not look away.The movies were like mescal dreams, poisedwonderfully between suspense and absurdity.

In later years, Clint was often willing to havehis super-hero outsmarted - by women, anelderly Indian and that orang-utan. But that'snot new. Leone's films were very violent, andthey played the action straight - if that's theway you wanted to read it. Yet the exaggeratedcompositions, the mannered acting and thefeeling of time oozing out as slowly as ketchupall suggested a satiric attitude on the part of thedirector and his star.

The Dollars trilogy kept Clint occupied in themid-Sixties. When he returned to America, heset about making this new kind of Western athome: Hang 'Em High (1968), Two Mules forSister Sara (1970), Joe Kidd (1972) and HighPlains Drifter (1973) are all in the same vein.The lesson that he had learned was that theoutsider hero suited him - not just anameless figure, but a man without knownallegiances. In 1968, for the first time, heteamed up with Don Siegel, a director oftwenty years hard-earned experience and anexpert story-teller with a predilection fortoughness. Siegel had always found Hollywood stars squeamish when asked to bemean, but Clint was different:

'Eastwood has an absolute fixation as ananti-hero. It's his credo in life and in all thefilms that he's done so far . . . I've neverworked with an actor who was less consciousof his good image.'

Coogan's Bluff - about an Arizona cop whocomes on a manhunt to New York - isn't quitethat heartless, but it did exploit the novelty ofthat handsome face snarling with hostility, ofthe Eastwood hero coolly laying any womanaround. Siegel would be as important to Eastwood as Leone, but there were a few yearsof hesitation before the new partnership clicked. Eastwood was overshadowed by RichardBurton in Brian Button's Where Eagles Dare (1968) and by Lee Marvin in Joshua Logan's Paint Your Wagon (1969).




Play dirty for Siegel

The year in which he emerged as a Hollywoodgiant was 1971. For Siegel he acted in TheBeguiled, about a fugitive in the American CivilWar taken in by a household of women whotake sweet vengeance on his complacentstud attitudes by amputating his injured leg.Then he directed his first film, Play Misty forMe, a slick thriller about a disc jockey who ishaunted and nearly killed by a woman whophones up with the request of the title. In boththese pictures Clint was making himself thevictim of women, and surely that owed itself tothe good humour of a happily married man (at the time) lusted after by so many strangers.

Dirty Harry, though, was the major event of1971, and the most controversial film he hasever made. Siegel's direction guaranteed itsimpact, but the subject went beyond mereentertainment. Dirty Harry Callahan is a SanFrancisco cop with an old-fashioned belief inthe law and the will that must enforce it. Thefilm is in two parts: first Harry tracks down aloathsome killer, a nasty mixture of spoiled kid psychopath and glib hippy: but then bureaucracy and the technicalities of the law let thekiller go free whereupon Harry makes a privatewar on him, eliminating him with prejudiceand then tossing away his police badge indisgust.

Some people felt that the picture encouragedvigilante fascism, that it was urging less liberallaw-and-order programmes (Eastwood had backed Nixon in 1968). But the picture is more themanifestation of a very independent, romanticmorality that shows in the star's aversion topublicity, extravagance and institutions:

'We, as Americans, went to Nuremberg andconvicted people who committed certaincrimes because they didn't adhere to a highermorality: we convicted them on that basis - and they shouldn't have listened to the law ofthe land or their leaders at that time. Theyshould have listened to the true morality.'




Softening the blows

It seems likely that he was affected by complaints about the violence in Dirty Harry andits successors, Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), The Gauntlet (1977), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988). His anti-hero has mellowed to become a more relaxed,more amused and marginally less robust observer. That was the process of tolerance thatworked so well in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), in which a righteous moral angersoftens with time to become aware of foibles,frailty and humour. In many ways it is hismost adventurous picture, a sign of the kindness he is often too shy or laid back to reveal.

Nor would anyone have expected Breezy (1973) from Eastwood. With William Holden and Kay Lenz, that was the story of a September-May romance, shamelessly sentimental but touching, solidly grounded andwell acted. For Clint it was about a man who'rediscovers life through the eyes of this younggirl'. It was the first hint that he might befearful of growing older, and it could have beena prelude to his own romantic interest in Sondra Locke. He resisted confessions or thegossip press, but for some time he workedwith the younger, blonde actress who had notreally acted for anyone but Eastwood (thoughthe failure of Bronco Billy apparently was the beginning of the end of that relationship and ended in the mother of all nasty break-ups on Locke's part).

In the 1980s, Eastwood continued to direct and star in atleast one big film a year, usually in hisestablished Western genre, but occassionallymaking forays into other styles. Firefox (1982),for instance, took him to Eastern Europe tosteal the blueprints for a new plane, while Heartbreak Ridge (1987) was set against thebackground of the Korean war. In 1985, the'man with no name' returned as a preacher in Pale Rider, this time to defend the local community against the bad guys. Meanwhile, Eastwood took on that role himself and became, for a time, the Mayor of his localCalifornian town of Carmel.

In the mid-eighties Clint made some solid movies but nothing really stuck out. Tightrope (1984), City Heat (1984) (with Burt Reynolds) and others were solid but not classic films. In 1988 Eastwood did his fifth and up to this point final Dirty Harry movie, the aforementioned The Dead Pool (1988). Although it was a success overall it did not have the box office punch his previous films had.

About this time with outright bombs like The Rookie (1990) and Pink Cadillac (1989), it was fairly obvious Eastwood's star was declining as it never had before. He then started taking on more personal projects such as directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie 'Bird' Parker, and starring in and directing White Hunter Black Heart (1990), an uneven, loose biography of John Huston. But Eastwood surprised yet again. First with his western, Unforgiven (1992), which garnered him an Oscar for director, and nomination for best actor. Then he took on the secret service in In the Line of Fire (1993), which was a big hit, followed by the interesting, but poorly received drama, A Perfect World (1993), with Kevin Costner. Next up was a love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995), a wistful and beautifully told love story.

Since The Bridges of Madison County, his films have been good, but not always successful at the Box Office. Among them were the badly received True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002), and the well received Space Cowboys (2000). But he did have a big success directing Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).

In 2003 he directed Mystic River, an Oscar winning film which filmgoers loved or loathed.

Eastwood has seven children, and has been married twice, and had a long time relationship with frequent co-star Sondra Locke.

• Flags Of Our Fathers / Letters From Iwo Jima
• Heartbreak Ridge
• Kelly's Heroes

Japanese Screen Calendar 1981
Wonderful Photos
Fully Scanned here

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Clint Eastwood autographs, dvds, photographs, dvds and more @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items) - just checked and a bigger selection than I have seen everywhere else

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