Bio
Clint Eastwood is an iconic American actor, composer and Academy Award-winning film director and producer.
While his recent work as a director, on films like Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima, is consistently praised by critics, Eastwood is perhaps most famous for his tough guy, anti-hero acting roles, including Inspector 'Dirty' Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry series and the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns.
Biography
Born in San Francisco in 1930, Eastwood moved often as a child as his father worked a variety of jobs along the West Coast. The family settled in Piedmont, California during his teens, and he graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1949.
He subsequently served in the United States Army before seeking an acting career in the early 1950s.
Film Career
Eastwood began work as an actor, making brief appearances in B-films such as Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula and Francis in the Navy.
In 1959, he got his first break with the long-running television series, Rawhide. As Rowdy Yates (whom Eastwood would later refer to in interviews as "the idiot of the plains"), he made the show his own and became a household name across the country.
1960s
Eastwood found lead roles as the mysterious Man with no name in Sergio Leone's loose trilogy of westerns A Fistful of Dollars / Per un pugno di dollari (1964), For a Few Dollars More / Per qualche dollaro in più (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly / Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966).
Although the first of these was evidently a tribute to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Leone used his innovative style to depict a wilder, more lawless and desolate world than traditional westerns.
All three films were hits, particularly the third, and Eastwood became an instant international star, redefining the traditional image of the American cowboy (though his character was actually a gunslinger rather than a traditional hero).
Stardom brought more roles, though still in the "tough guy" mold. In Where Eagles Dare (1968) he had second billing to Richard Burton but was paid $800,000.
In the same year, he starred in Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff, in which Eastwood was a lonely sheriff who came to the big city of New York to enforce the law in his own way.
The film was controversial for its straightforward portrayal of violence, but it launched a more than 10-year collaboration between Eastwood and Siegel and set the prototype for the macho cop hero that Eastwood would play in the Dirty Harry series of films.
In the next year Eastwood began to branch out. Paint Your Wagon (1969) was a western, but also a musical.
1970s
Kelly's Heroes (1970) combined tough-guy action with offbeat humour. Clint made a western with Shirley McLaine in Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970). In The Beguiled, directed again by Siegel, he played a villain.
However 1971 proved to be a professional turning point for his career. His production company, Malpaso, was new but gave Eastwood the control he desired, allowing him to direct and star in the thriller Play Misty for Me.
But it was his portrayal of the hard-edged police inspector Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry that propelled Siegel's most successful movie at the box-office and arguably established Eastwood's most memorable character.
The film has been credited with inventing the "loose-cannon cop genre" that is imitated to this day. Eastwood's tough, no-nonsense cop touched a cultural nerve with many who were fed up with crime in the streets.
Dirty Harry led to four sequels: Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988), as well as sparking numerous imitators such as Death Wish (1974), which had four sequels of its own.
Eastwood directed two important, morality play westerns during the 1970s, High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).
In 1974, Eastwood teamed with a young actor named Jeff Bridges in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. The movie was written and directed by Michael Cimino, who had previously written only the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force (and would win an Oscar for directing The Deer Hunter four years later).
In 1975, Eastwood brought another talent to the screen: rock climbing. In The Eiger Sanction, in which he directed and starred, Eastwood — a 5.9 climber — performed his own rock climbing stunts.
This film has become a cult classic in the rock climbing community. It was made before the advent of CGI, so no digital manipulation was used in the film.
In 1978, he starred in Every Which Way But Loose in an uncharacteristic and offbeat comedy role as Philo Beddoe, a trucker and brawler roaming the American West in search of a lost love while accompanying his brother/manager Orville and his pet orangutan, Clyde.
Panned by critics, the movie was an enormous success and along with its 1980 sequel Any Which Way You Can are the two highest-grossing Eastwood movies.
In 1979 Eastwood played another memorable role as the prison escapee Frank Morris in the fact-based movie Escape from Alcatraz. Morris was an escape artist who was sent to Alcatraz in 1960, which was, at the time, one of the toughest prisons in America.
Morris devised a carefully thought out plan to escape from "The Rock" and, in 1962, he and two other prisoners broke out of the prison and entered San Francisco Bay. They were never seen again, and although the FBI believes that the escapees drowned, to this day their actual fate is unknown.
1980s
It was the fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), that made Eastwood a viable star for the '80s. President Reagan used his famous "make my day" line in one of his speeches.
Eastwood revisited the western genre directing and starring in Pale Rider (1985), paying homage to the western film classic Shane which was rehearsed at the Cannes Film Festival.
His fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988), was a success overall, but it did not have the box office punch his previous films had achieved.
Eastwood alternated between more mainstream comedic films (if not particularly successful) such as Pink Cadillac (1989), and The Rookie (1990) and more personal projects, such as directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie "Bird" Parker, which gave him the nomination for Golden Palm in the Cannes Film Festival.
He also starred in and directed White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), an uneven, loose biography of John Huston, which received some critical acclaim, although Katharine Hepburn contested the veracity of much of the material.
1990s
Eastwood rose to prominence yet again in the early 1990s. He directed and starred in the revisionist western Unforgiven in 1992, taking on the role of an aging ex-gunfighter long past his prime.
The film, also starring such heavyweight actors as Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris, laid the groundwork for such later westerns as Deadwood by re-envisioning established genre conventions in a more ambiguous and unromantic light.
A great success both in terms of box office and critical acclaim, it was nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Actor for Eastwood, and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood.
The following year, Eastwood played a guilt-ridden Secret Service agent in the thriller In the Line of Fire (1993) directed by Wolfgang Petersen. This film was a blockbuster and among the top 10 box-office performers in that year.
Eastwood directed and starred with Kevin Costner in A Perfect World in the same year.
He continued to expand his repertoire by playing opposite Meryl Streep in the love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995). Based on a best-selling novel, it was also a hit at the box-office.
Afterward, Eastwood turned to more directing work — much of it well received — including Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).
2000s
In 2002, Eastwood played an ex-FBI agent on the track of a sadistic killeracted in Blood Work, which was derived from a book by Michael Connelly. In 2003 he directed Mystic River in which he garnered a Best Director nomination.
But he found critical acclaim with Million Dollar Baby in 2004. This movie won 4 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Eastwood was nomimated for Best Actor (but lost to Jamie Foxx).
Directing
Eastwood has developed directing as a second career, and has generally received greater critical acclaim for his directing than he ever did for his acting.
Eastwood has become known for directing high-quality but pessimistic dramas such as Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, and Letters from Iwo Jima. However, he has chosen a wide variety of films to direct, some clearly commercial, others highly personal.
Eastwood also produces many of his movies, and is well known in the industry for his efficient, low-cost approach to making films. Over the years, he has developed relationships with many other filmmakers, working over and over with the same crew, production designers, cinematographers, editors and other technical people.
Similarly, he has a long-term relationship with the Warner Bros. studio, which finances and releases most of his films (although, in a 2004 interview appearing in The New York Times, Eastwood noted that he still sometimes has difficulty convincing the studio to back his films).
In more recent years, Eastwood also has begun writing music for some of his films.
Awards and Nominations
Eastwood has been nominated for the Academy Award for directing and producing eight times, winning for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby (his other nominations come for Mystic River and Letters from Iwo Jima), and twice for acting (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby), though he has not won an Academy Award for acting.
He is one of only three living directors (along with Miloš Forman and Francis Ford Coppola) to have directed two Best Picture winners, Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, the second of which earned him his second Best Director Oscar.
At age 74, he was the oldest director to achieve this distinction.
Eastwood has received numerous other awards, including an America Now TV Award as well as one of the 2000 Kennedy Center Honors. He also received an honorary degree from University of the Pacific in 2006, and an honorary degree from University of Southern California in 2007.
In 1994 He received the honorary Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in acting.
In 2006, he received a nomination for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Score Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media for Million Dollar Baby.
In 2007, Eastwood was the first recipient of the Jack Valenti Humanitarian Award, an annual award presented by the MPAA to individuals in the motion picture industry whose work has reached out positively and respectfully to the world.
Eastwood received the award for his work on the 2006 films Flags of Our Fathers and the Academy Award-nominated Letters from Iwo Jima.
In early 2007, Eastwood was presented with the highest civilian distinction in France, Légion d'honneur, at a ceremony in Paris. French President Jacques Chirac told Eastwood that he embodied "the best of Hollywood".
In early 2007, Eastwood announced that he will produce a Bruce Ricker documentary about jazz legend Dave Brubeck. The film is tentatively titled "Dave Brubeck – In His Own Sweet Way." It will trace the development of Brubeck’s latest composition, the Cannery Row Suite. This work was commissioned by the Monterey Jazz Festival and premiered at the 2006 festival.
Political Career
Eastwood made one successful foray into elected politics, becoming the Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea (Carmel), California (population 4000), a wealthy small town and artist community on the Monterey Peninsula, for one term.
Frustrated with what he perceived to be the bureaucracy in Carmel's politics, he ran a last-minute, small scale campaign emphasizing better relations between the residential and business communities.
On election day, April 8, 1986, with double the voter turnout, Eastwood garnered 72.5% of the vote and was elected to a position that paid $200 per month.
During his tenure he tried to balance the rights of preservationists and develop the town for local business. Eastwood decided not to run for a second term due to the number of small scale decisions required of the mayor in such a small town.
During his tenure he completed Heartbreak Ridge and Bird. On a lighter note, as mayor he repealed a municipal law that forbade anyone from eating ice cream on the sidewalk.
Eastwood has been registered as a Republican since 1951, and was a supporter of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. He describes himself as a libertarian, describing his philosophy as "Everyone leaves everyone else alone."
He voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California in 2003 and 2006.
Personal Life
Eastwood, who has been married twice, has five daughters and two sons by five different women: Kimber (born 1964), with Roxanne Tunis; Kyle (born in 1968) and Alison (born on May 22, 1972), with ex-wife Maggie Johnson; Scott (born March 21, 1986) and Kathryn (born February 2, 1988), with airline hostess Barrett Stone; Francesca Ruth (born August 7, 1993), with Frances Fisher, his co-star in Unforgiven; and Morgan (born December 12, 1996), with current wife Dina Ruiz.
Eastwood lived with actress Sondra Locke from 1976 to 1988. The relationship produced no children.
Eastwood remains a sex symbol for many. He once said, "I like to joke that since my children weren't making me any grandchildren, I had two of my own. It is a terrific feeling being a dad again at my age. I am very fortunate. I realize how unfair a thing it is that men can have children at a much older age than women."
He now has two grandchildren, Clinton (born 1984) and Graylen (born 1994) of Kimber and Kyle, respectively.
Eastwood owns the exclusive Tehama Golf Club located in Carmel within Monterey County. The invitation-only club reportedly has around 300 members and a joining price of $500,000. Eastwood is also the owner of the Mission Ranch Hotel and Restaurant, located in Carmel as well.
Eastwood is also an audiophile, known for his love of jazz. He owns an extensive collection of LPs which he plays on a Rockport turntable. His interest in music was passed on to his son Kyle, now a jazz musician.
It is also stated that Eastwood is a descendent of William Bradford, a pilgrim that sailed to America on the Mayflower.
Source: Wikipedia