Born: 31 May 1930 (Age: 80)
Where: San Francisco, California, USA
Height: 6' 4"
Awards: Won 4 Oscars and 5 Golden Globes, nominated for 3 BAFTAs.
He is, of course, best known as The Man With No Name. With that menacing squint, the cigar-stub clenched between his teeth, the Stetson pulled low, ever ready to flip back that dirty poncho and reveal that well-oiled six-shooter. Woe betide you if you ever insulted his mule. Everyone, but everyone knows Clint Eastwood from Sergio Leone's Dollar trilogy. That was how he came to fame, wasn't it? Those were the films that led him to become the cynical deputy sheriff of Coogan's Bluff, the mystic revengers of High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, the last of the rebel hold-outs in The Outlaw Josey Wales, and the aged gunslinger dragged back to violence in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven.
But, though he achieved his box-office breakthrough with those legendary mid-Sixties spaghetti westerns, and over the next 3 decades produced some of the greatest cowboy movies ever made, Eastwood has also scored major financial and artistic successes far beyond the dusty genre that spawned him. Where, say, sylvester stallone found trouble when he stepped away from Rocky or Rambo, Eastwood remained convincing when not portraying his cold frontiersman or his other major character, the perp-hating, authority-baiting "Dirty" Harry Callahan. Think of his manipulative Confederate seducer in The Beguiled: his orang-utan-loving bare-knuckle fighter in Every Which Way But Loose: his drunken cop, doomed by his incompetence in The Gauntlet: his dying singer, battling his way to the Grand Ole Oprey in Honkytonk Man: his haunted agent, desperate to save the President in In The Line Of Fire: his ageing photographer, suffering unrequited love in The Bridges Of Madison County. No sign of the silent killer there, but great films, all of them, along with so many more. It is to the Academy's undying shame that Eastwood was not nominated in any category till he was gone 60.
That said, his westerns have made such an icon of him that it's hard to conceive he was ever born - it's so much easier to imagine him riding out of the desert one day, fully-formed, heavily armed and quietly demanding to see Sam Goldwyn. Nevertheless, he did have a mum and dad - Clinton Senior and Ruth - and an older sister, Jean. Dad was a steelworker, but this being the Great Depression, work was hard to find, the family moving all over California (Clint was born in St Francis Hospital, San Francisco) before finally settling in Oakland.
Clint's early education would set the seal on his later approach to work.
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