Clint Eastwood, in full Clinton Eastwood, Jr., is an American motion-picture actor who emerged as one of the most popular Hollywood stars in the 1960s and went on to become a prolific and respected director-producer.
Background
Ethnicity:
Eastwood is of English, Irish, Scottish, and Dutch ancestry.
Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, California. He is the son of Clinton Eastwood Sr. and Ruth (Runner) Wood. Ruth later took the surname of her second husband, John Belden Wood, whom she married after the death of Clinton Sr. Eastwood was nicknamed "Samson" by the hospital nurses because he weighed 11 pounds 6 ounces (5.2 kg) at birth. He has one younger sister, Jeanne Bernhardt (born 1934). He is descended from Mayflower passenger William Bradford, and through this line is the 12th generation of his family born in North America.
During the 1930s, his family moved often as his father worked at jobs along the West Coast. Settled in Piedmont, California, the Eastwoods lived in a very wealthy part of town, had a swimming pool, belonged to the country club, and each parent drove their own car.
Education
Clint attended Piedmont Middle School, where he was held back due to poor academic scores; records indicate he also had to attend summer school. From January 1945 to at least January 1946, he attended Piedmont High School, but was asked to leave for writing an obscene suggestion to a school official on the athletic field scoreboard, and for burying someone in effigy on the school lawn, on top of other school infractions. He transferred to Oakland Technical High School and was scheduled to graduate in January 1949 as a midyear graduate, although it is not clear if he ever did. After graduating from high school in California and briefly attending Los Angeles City College, Eastwood held various jobs and served in the U.S. Army before moving to Hollywood.
Eastwood has been awarded at least three honorary degrees from universities and colleges, including an honorary degree from the University of the Pacific in 2006, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Southern California on May 27, 2007, and an honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Berklee College of Music at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 22, 2007.
A screen test with Universal in 1954 netted Eastwood a 40-week contract, but after one renewal and a series of bit parts in such movies as Tarantula (1955) and Revenge of the Creature (1955), his option was dropped. He appeared in several TV series before he got his big break in 1959 by being cast as Rowdy Yates in the popular TV western Rawhide (1959–65).
Eastwood achieved international stardom during this same period when he played The Man with No Name - a laconic, fearless gunfighter whose stoicism masks his brutality - in three Italian westerns (popularly known as "spaghetti westerns") directed by Sergio Leone: Per un pugno di dollari (1964; A Fistful of Dollars), Per qualche dollari in più (1965; For a Few Dollars More), and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). In 1967 the three films played in the United States and were immediate commercial successes, establishing Eastwood as a box-office star.
For Eastwood’s first American western, Hang ’Em High (1968) - Ted Post’s expert imitation of the Leone formula, enlivened by a superior group of character actors - he formed his own production company, Malpaso. He also worked with Don Siegel on the popular police story Coogan’s Bluff (1968); it was Siegel who taught him most of what he needed to know about directing, a debt Eastwood often acknowledged. He also worked with Siegel on the western Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), the psychological Civil War drama The Beguiled (1971), and the prison-break film Escape from Alcatraz (1979). Their best-known collaboration was Dirty Harry (1971), in which Eastwood first portrayed the ruthlessly effective police inspector Harry Callahan. The film proved to be one of Eastwood’s most successful, spawning four sequels and establishing the no-nonsense character Dirty Harry - known for such catchphrases as "Go ahead, make my day" - as a cinema icon.
Eastwood turned to directing in such films as the thriller Play Misty for Me (1971), the westerns High Plains Drifter (1972) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and the espionage thriller The Eiger Sanction (1975), all films in which he also played leading roles. Eastwood took over the western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) from Philip Kaufman, who co-wrote the story of a Missouri farmer driven to violence after his family has been slaughtered by renegade Union soldiers. Stylishly photographed by Bruce Surtees, with a fine performance by Chief Dan George as a Cherokee elder, this work humanized Eastwood’s mythic avenger archetype for the first time.
Eastwood went on to make The Gauntlet (1977), a kinetic but formulaic action film in which he played a police detective trying to transport a witness (Sondra Locke) to an Arizona courthouse where she can testify. The gentle good humour pervading Bronco Billy (1980) was far removed from the mayhem of his westerns and cop movies; Eastwood was deft as the proprietor of a two-bit Wild West show who gives shelter to, then falls in love with, a runaway heiress (Locke). Firefox (1982) was a high-tech Cold War story that had Eastwood as a pilot stealing a supersonic jet from the Soviets. The whimsical and sentimental Honkytonk Man (1982), set during the Great Depression, featured Eastwood as a country singer dying of tuberculosis whose dream is to make it to the Grand Ole Opry before he passes on.
Having wandered rather far afield from his star action persona, Eastwood directed the fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), with Locke portraying a rape victim on a vengeful murder spree. He then returned to his screen roots with the neo-mythic Pale Rider (1985), a quasi-religious western. It showcased Eastwood’s iconic presence and Surtees’s gorgeous photography and was one of the few hit westerns of the 1980s.
Heartbreak Ridge (1986) was an enjoyable drama about an old-school marine sergeant (Eastwood) on the verge of retirement whose tough approach whips a group of raw recruits into shape for the invasion of Grenada. White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) was Eastwood’s most audacious project of this period of his career, an adaptation of Peter Viertel’s roman à clef about his on-location collaboration with director John Huston on The African Queen (1951).
Eastwood also directed the well-regarded Bird (1988), a film biography of saxophonist Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker), and produced the documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988). Offscreen, Eastwood made national headlines in 1986 when he was elected mayor of Carmel, California; he served for two years.
After the unsuccessful police drama The Rookie (1990), his revisionist western Unforgiven (1992) featured a towering performance by Eastwood as an erstwhile "regulator" who lays down his plowshare to execute a thug who has disfigured a prostitute. Both the picture and Eastwood (for best director) won Academy Awards. The film was critically lauded for Eastwood’s unsentimental look at frontier violence.
In the quiet drama A Perfect World (1993), an escaped convict (Kevin Costner) takes a boy (T.J. Lowther) hostage, and an unlikely bond forms between them. Eastwood played a Texas Ranger tracking them down. He made a rare appearance in another director’s film when he played a Secret Service agent trying to thwart a presidential assassination in Wolfgang Petersen’s popular action thriller In the Line of Fire (1993).
The Bridges of Madison County (1995) was Eastwood’s effective mounting of the enormously popular novel by Robert James Waller. Eastwood was excellent as a photographer traveling through Iowa for a magazine piece on its historic covered bridges, and Meryl Streep played a farmer’s wife who, against her better judgment, enters into an affair with him.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) was also based on a book that became a publishing phenomenon, the nonfiction bestseller by John Berendt about a murder that rocks the community of Savannah, Georgia, which is populated almost entirely by eccentrics. In the thriller Absolute Power (1997) Eastwood played a thief who, in the midst of a robbery, witnesses the Secret Service murder a woman whom the president of the United States (Gene Hackman) has just attacked sexually. In True Crime (1999) Eastwood starred as a veteran reporter whose investigative skills revive when he learns that a prisoner (Isaiah Washington) scheduled for execution that night is probably innocent.
Space Cowboys (2000) had Eastwood as the head of a team of elderly test pilots (Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland) who have been summoned out of retirement to rescue NASA when an obsolete Russian satellite requires disarming. Blood Work (2002) was a serviceable thriller about a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) profiler who is convinced that only he can locate a murderer.
Mystic River (2003) set a new standard for Eastwood as a director. Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins starred as childhood pals who have grown up to live widely disparate lives while still bound to the working-class neighbourhood they were born into. Eastwood took another best director Oscar nomination, and the film was also a best picture nominee.
Million Dollar Baby (2004) was another success for Eastwood. Probably the biggest dark-horse success of Eastwood’s career, Million Dollar Baby won Oscars for best picture, best actress (Swank), and best supporting actor (Morgan Freeman). It also brought Eastwood his second Oscar for best director. The film broke the $100 million mark at the American box office. Eastwood next directed the World War II films Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), both of which focus on the Battle of Iwo Jima. The latter, told from the Japanese perspective, was nominated for several Oscars, including best director and best film.
Changeling (2008) was a period piece set in Los Angeles in 1928. In Gran Torino (2008), Eastwood played Walt Kowalski, an irascible retired autoworker living in a blue-collar suburb of Detroit who is forced to shake off a lifetime of suspicion toward minorities so as to don the role of protector to a family of Hmong immigrants. The film was a major box-office hit.
Shot in Capetown, South Africa, Invictus (2009) took as its subject Pres. Nelson Mandela (Freeman) and his plan to unite his racially divided country by using the 1995 Rugby World Cup, in which South Africa’s almost all-white Springboks team, typically reviled by the majority black populace, faced heavily favoured New Zealand in the finals.
Hereafter (2010) was an oddity in the Eastwood canon - a measured, quiet drama about three characters whose widely divergent life experiences have left them convinced of the reality of an afterlife. The anguish experienced by each is etched expertly by Eastwood, but the story is told at a languid pace. J. Edgar (2011) was a weighty biopic of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), the longtime head of the FBI. Eastwood then helmed a film adaptation (2014) of the Tony Award-winning (2006) musical Jersey Boys, about the rise of the American rock-and-roll group the Four Seasons.
Eastwood’s adaptation of a Navy SEAL sniper’s memoir, American Sniper (2014), was lauded for the finesse with which it depicted both the violence of the Iraq War and the difficulty of a soldier’s adjustment to civilian existence. The film received an Academy Award nomination for best picture. Eastwood continued to draw inspiration from true-life events with Sully, about airline pilot Chesley ("Sully") Sullenberger (played by Tom Hanks), who landed a malfunctioning commercial jet on the Hudson River. The docudrama chronicles both the emergency landing and the ensuing investigation into Sullenberger’s handling of the event. Eastwood then took recreating a true-life event further when he cast the three Americans who thwarted a 2015 terrorist attack on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train to play themselves in The 15:17 to Paris (2018). Eastwood next starred in and directed The Mule, which was released in December 2018.
In 1973, Eastwood told the late film critic Gene Siskel, "No, I don't believe in God." Nearly four decades later while promoting his film, Hereafter (2010), Eastwood stated that "I was always respectful of people who were deeply religious because I always felt that if they gave themselves to it, then it had to be important to them. But if you can go through life without it, that’s OK, too. It’s whatever suits you. I do believe in self-help. I’m not a New Age person but I do believe in meditation, and for that reason I’ve always liked the Buddhist religion. When I’ve been to Japan I’ve been to Buddhist temples and meditated and I found that rewarding."
As much as anything, Eastwood has found spirituality in nature (as suggested by his 1985 Western, Pale Rider), stating that "I was born during the Depression and I was brought up with no specific church. We moved every four or five months during the first 14 years of my life, so I was sent to a different church depending on wherever we lived. Most of them were Protestant, but I went to other churches because my parents wanted me to try to figure out things for myself. They always said, ‘I just want to expose you to some religious order and see if that’s something you like’. So although my religious training was not really specific, I do feel spiritual things. If I stand on the side of the Grand Canyon and look down, it moves me in some way."
In 1975, Eastwood publicly proclaimed his participation in Transcendental Meditation when he appeared on The Merv Griffin Show with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation. He has meditated every morning for years.
Politics
Eastwood has long shown an interest in politics and is a registered Libertarian. He won election as the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California in April 1986. In 2001, Governor Gray Davis appointed him to the California State Park and Recreation Commission, where he led the opposition to an extension of the toll six-lane 16-mile (26 km) freeway extension of California State Route 241 through San Onofre State Beach. Eastwood endorsed Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. He delivered a prime time address at the 2012 Republican National Convention, where he drew attention for a speech he delivered to an empty chair representing Barack Obama. After serving one two-year term-and changing the laws-he stepped down with no regrets.
Views
Quotations:
"I have a very strict gun control policy: if there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it."
"Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power."
"I tried being reasonable, I didn't like it."
"They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning."
"If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster."
"I don't believe in pessimism. If something doesn't come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it's going to rain, it will."
"Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands."
"It takes tremendous discipline to control the influence, the power you have over other people's lives."
"I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice."
Membership
Clint Eastwood is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Personality
Eastwood has been conscious of his health and fitness since he was a teenager, and practices healthful eating habits. As a young man making a name for himself during the production of Rawhide, Eastwood would be featured in magazines and journals, which often documented his health-conscious lifestyle. In the August 1959 edition of TV Guide, for example, Eastwood was photographed doing push-ups. He gave tips on fitness and nutrition, telling people to eat plenty of fruit and raw vegetables, to take vitamins, and to avoid sugar-loaded beverages, excessive alcohol, and overloading on carbohydrates. Although Eastwood had always been a health and fitness enthusiast, he became more so after his father's death. He abstained from hard liquor, adopted a more rigorous health regime, and sought to stay fit.
Eastwood's character is callous, violent, cynical, tough. Facets of that character were present in his best westerns, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Unforgiven (1992), both stark bloody films about an outsider. The same toughness also characterized many of Eastwood's non-western roles. Eastwood's direction has been described as "a lean location sense of realism"; his technique shows economy, vitality, imagination, and a good sense of humor. Eastwood has made his home in Carmel, California, far from filmdom's party circuit. There he lived a private life, spending time with friends who were not involved in the entertainment industry. And he is known as a loyal employer whose production crew included people who had worked for him for 15 years.
Physical Characteristics:
His height is 6’ 4” (193 cm), his weight is 198 pounds (90 kg). His natural hair color was light brown and eye color is gray.
Quotes from others about the person
"The roles that Eastwood has played, and the films that he has directed, cannot be disentangled from the nature of the American culture of the last quarter century, its fantasies and its realities." - Edward Gallafent, commenting on Eastwood's impact on film from the 1970s to 1990s
"Lazy, and would cost you a morning. I never started a day with Clint Eastwood in the first scene, because you knew he was gonna be late, at least a half hour or an hour." - Thomas Carr
"At that time I needed a mask rather than an actor, and Eastwood had only two facial expressions: one with the hat and one without it." - Sergio Leone
"He just made my day. What a guy." - Mitt Romney
Interests
Eastwood is an experienced pilot, and sometimes flies his own helicopter to the studio to avoid traffic.
He favored cold beer and opened a pub called the Hog's Breath Inn in Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1971. Eastwood eventually sold the pub and now owns the Mission Ranch Hotel and Restaurant, also located in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Sport & Clubs
Eastwood owns the Tehàma Golf Club, located in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and is an investor in the Pebble Beach Golf Links. He plays golf, including at tournaments sponsoring charitable causes.
Music & Bands
Eastwood was a lifelong devotee of jazz and an accomplished pianist.
Connections
Eastwood has had numerous casual and serious relationships of varying length and intensity over his life. Between proposing to and marrying "Maggie" Johnson in 1953, he had an affair that allegedly resulted in a child who was given up for adoption. He continued having affairs while married to Johnson, including a 14-year long relationship with actress and stunt woman Roxanne Tunis that produced a daughter. Johnson reportedly tolerated an open marriage with Eastwood. Eastwood and Johnson were divorced, and he continued seeing many other women. In 1975, actress Sondra Locke began living with Eastwood. She took the relationship seriously and was extremely distraught when she discovered much later that Eastwood continued to have sexual relationships with other women. When they separated, Locke filed a palimony lawsuit. Eastwood had two children with stewardess Jacelyn Reeves in the 1980s. His second marriage was to news anchor Dina Ruiz in 1996, which lasted until 2013.