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Clint Eastwood - Biography

Actor. Director, Producer. Born Clinton Eastwood, Jr., on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, educated at Los Angeles City College. A child of the Depression, he spent his early boyhood training a father who pumped gas along dusty roads all over the West Coast. Young Clint rarely spent more than a semester in one school, and after graduating from high school, he worked as a logger, steel-furnace stoker, and gas pumper. After a four-year stint (1950-1954) with the Army Special Services, he settled in Hollywood in 1955 as a small-time actor. He enjoyed a modest success as a character named Rowdy Yates in the TV Western series "Rawhide", which ran for eight seasons from the late 50's through the mid-60's.

But it was in Italy that he found his fame and fortune, as the laconic, super cool "Man With No Name" hero of three violence-filled "spaghetti Westerns" by Sergio Leone, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1964-1966). Enormously popular worldwide, the trilogy catapulted Eastwood into top-ranking box-office stardom and established his screen image as a lanky, tight-lipped, beleaguered hero, a role he continued to play back in the States in a succession of Don Siegel films in the late 60's and in his own films as director from the early 70's. He heads his own production company, Malpaso Productions.

The film that firmly established Eastwood as a superstar and with which he remained most closely identified throughout his career was Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971). An exciting but controversial action picture, called excessively brutal by some, and blatantly fascist by others, it was followed by four sequels in a span of 17 years.

As a director, Eastwood gradually won the respect of many critics for his no-nonsense approach to film-making and his intuitive ability to handle action fluidly. In 1980 the New York Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of Eastwood films. In 1985 following a retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise, he was decorated Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Government. In 1986-1988 he served as the elected mayor of Carmel, California.

Eastwood's 1988 biographical film Bird, based on the life of jazz legend Charlie Parker, gained international acclaim and heightened his critical standing. The dark revisionist western Unforgiven (1992) won an Oscar for Best Picture and extended the critical view, setting him in iconic relief as both actor and director. After decades of competency and artlessness, he is seen as a spare, epic directorial master and an actor who makes aging seem not only acceptable but glamorous.

A long-time jazz aficionado, he has featured jazz music in many of his movies and played jazz piano in In the Line of Fire. At sixty-five, he earned the honorary Irving G. Thalberg Award from the Academy, and bit into the plum romantic role of photographer Robert Kincaid (opposite Meryl Streep) in The Bridges of Madison County.

While Eastwood has tried to keep his personal life largely private, choosing to live out of the Hollywood limelight, in Carmel, he has seen his fair share of scandal. Married in 1954 to Maggie Johnson, he fathered a daughter, Kimber, by actress Roxanne Tunis in 1964. He and Maggie later had two kids of their own, but the couple split in the late seventies, when Eastwood took up with sometime co-star Sondra Locke. His split from Locke was even more traumatic, leading to multimillion-dollar lawsuits against Eastwood and his studio, Warner Bros. (Eastwood and Locke finally settled out of court for an undisclosed amount in September of 1996.).

Eastwood married television news journalist Dina Ruiz, who is thirty-five years his junior, and the couple had a baby daughter in December 1996. Eastwood produced, directed, and starred in the 1997 political thriller Absolute Power, and is set to direct Golf in the Kingdom and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.