Clint Eastwood
ALL ABOUT CLINT EASTWOOD
Full Name: Clint Eastwood Jr.
Birth Date: May 31, 1930
Birth Place: St. Francis Hospital, San Francisco, California, USA
Profession: actor, composer, director, producer, writer
Education: Eight elementary schools Oakland Technical High School in Oakland, California Los Angeles City College in Los Angeles, California (majored in Business)
Husband/Wife: Dina Ruiz (TV news anchor; married on March 31, 1996, in Las Vegas, Nevada), Maggie Eastwood (aka Maggie Johnson; married in December 1953; divorced in 1980)
Relationship: Sondra Locke (actress; together from 1977 to 1989), Frances Fisher (actress; born on May 11, 1952; 1 son), Roxanne Tunis (actress)
Father: Clinton Eastwood Sr. (steelworker, migratory worker)
Mother: Francesca Ruth Eastwood (born in 1909)
Sister: Jean Eastwood (older)
Son: Kyle Eastwood (actor, musician; born on May 19, 1968; mother: Maggie Eastwood)
Daughter: Morgan Eastwood (born on December 12, 1996; mother: Dina Ruiz), Francesca Eastwood (born on August 7, 1993; mother: Frances Fisher), Alison Eastwood (actress; born on May 22, 1972; mother: Maggie Eastwood), Kimber Eastwood (actress; born on June 17, 1964)
Grand son: Graylen Eastwood (born in 1994; father: Kyle Eastwood), Clinton Eastwood (born in 1984; mother: Kimber Eastwood)
Bio:
The first time he spoke lines to a camera, he blew them. A couple of pictures later he spoke his lines perfectly, but he was buried so deep in a dark scene that he couldn’t be seen. Toward the end of his first year as an actor, he had a nice little scene with a major star on a major production, and he found a good-looking pair of glasses that he thought gave him a bit of character. But Rock Hudson thought the same thing when he saw the kid wearing them, and Clint had to surrender his specs to the leading man.
This was Clint Eastwood’s life as an eager young contract player at Universal circa 1955, and it turned out to be a short one–the studio dropped him after a year and a half. On his own, he did what young actors do: played scenes in acting classes, worked out at the gym, went on auditions, did odd jobs (mostly he dug swimming pools under the hot sun of the San Fernando Valley). Every once in a while he got an acting job–on Highway Patrol, on Death Valley Days. Once a big time show flew him east to work on location on West Point Stories. He got to bully James Garner on an episode of Maverick. A couple of times his heart leapt up: he got good billing in a feature, The First Traveling Saleslady, playing opposite Carol Channing; and he thought for awhile that he had one of the leads in another feature, Lafayette Escadrille. But the first film was a flop, and he had to settle for a much smaller role in the second. When he finally got a decent part in a movie, it was in a B western so bad it almost caused him to quit the business.
In short, his was the archetypal show-biz struggle. It ended archetypically, too. He was visiting a friend at CBS and strolling down one of its long corridors of power, when a man in a suit, an executive, popped out of a door, took a long look at this nice-looking kid and asked, “Are you an actor!” Turned out he was looking for someone to play the second lead in a western series called Rawhide that the network was about to produce. Thus was Rowdy Yates born. Thus did Clint Eastwood achieve his first fame and, if not fortune, then the security of a running part in a series that lasted seven years.
Rowdy was like most everyone else Clint played in those years–a nice young man, politely spoken and highly principled, but to him, not very interesting. He once told an interviewer that he knew he “wouldn’t make any impact until [his] 30s” because in those days he still looked like he was about 18 and “had a certain amount of living to do.” Alas, he was still playing Rowdy, still in effect a juvenile, when he reached his early 30s, which was terribly frustrating to him. Which is why he agreed to spend the 1964 Rawhide hiatus in Spain making a western for an unknown Italian director. The money was poor, the prestige nonexistent, but the film that was eventually released as A Fistful of Dollars offered him a character he had never played–a grizzled grown-up, tough and morally ambiguous.
Clint has never been given sufficient credit for the imaginative leap this undertaking represented, for the courage it required to willfully subvert his safe, boyish image of the time. By taking this long shot, he not only ended his long apprenticeship, he became a true rarity–an entirely self-made star.
“I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn’t,” Clint Eastwood once said. “But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was.”
To put it mildly. For actors, more than most people, genetics is destiny. Historically, we may be sure, there were short, chubby, talkative cowhands. Bur not in the movies, where the classic western heroes have always been tall, thin, laconic–and flinty-eyed. Or perhaps one should say, Clinty-eyed. Anyway, he looked the part, and he gained his first featured roles (The First Traveling Saleslady, Ambush at Cimarron Pass), his first fame (as Rowdy Yates in television’s Rawhide, the beginnings of international stardom (in the three spaghetti westerns he made with Sergio Leone) and his Academy Awards (for Unforgiven) by acting the cowboy.
When he went off to Italy to make A Fistful of Dollars, he was thinking “the western was in a dead place, encrusted with myth, poetry, stale pictorialism and simple moralizing.” The thing that drew him to this unlikely, low-paying project was the quality that earned it and his other Leone films so much disapproval when they first appeared–their straightforward, darkly comic insistence on the primitive and entirely ignoble nature of frontier life.
Their impact on the genre was ultimately liberating–to Clint Eastwood as well as to others working in the form. In the first of the Leone films, Clint’s character was styled as “a grizzled Christ figure” (to use critic Richard Corliss’ phrase) who undergoes a calvary and a resurrection before bringing redemption–at the end of his gun barrel–to the hellish Mexican border town of San Miguel. In the first film Clint’s Malpaso Productions produced, Hang ‘Em High, his character, Jed Cooper, is hanged and left for dead in the movie’s opening minutes. Rescued, he becomes a lawman who liberates an entire frontier territory from lynch law. In High Plains Drifter, the first western Clint directed, his character quite possibly represents a figure reincarnated to bring justice to a town every bit as evil as San Miguel. In Pale Rider, his Preacher is unquestionably such a figure–returned from the grave to defend the meek and the weak from their earthly tormentors. In the two most aspiring of the films he has directed, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven, he plays a man broken in spirit who finds redemption through altruistic actions reluctantly undertaken (and in the latter, more ambiguously stated).
Some aspect of the western landscape obviously moves Clint Eastwood to thoughts of regeneration, for it is not a subject his other films take up. Perhaps such meditations can be traced back to his boyhood, when his parents took him to Yosemite, and he first “looked down into that valley” and was moved to something like a spiritual experience by the silence, the emptiness, the beauty of the place. If ever a man were lost and needed to find himself, it is in such a place that he might begin the search. For we find in his westerns, harsh and “realistic” as they are in tone, that a whispered yearning for–dare one use the word–transcendence can sometimes be heard.
Clint Eastwood became a star in westerns, but he became a superstar playing cops. One can even identify the exact moment when it happened. It is early in Dirty Harry, when a gang tries to rob the bank across the street from Inspector Harry Callahan’s favorite hot dog stand. He looks up irritably as sirens sound, guns fire, cars start crashing. Then he strolls out into the street, still chewing his food as he unlimbers his .44 Magnum, wounds one of the miscreants and opens his immortal dialogue with the man (”I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five.”
This exchange provides one of the sublime moments in modern American movies, not least because it so deliciously parodies the whole tradition of super-cool movie heroism without ever acknowledging what it is up to. Audiences, of course, loved the scene and the tough, suspenseful Don Siegel movie in which it was embedded. Ultimately, Clint would reprise his Dirty Harry characterization four times. But one critic, Pauline Kael, loathed it. The action genre, she wrote, “has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced.” Her criticism made the movie “controversial:’ and her insinuation that Clint was some kind of right-wing crazy dogged him for decades.
Dirty Harry tapped into popular resentment of what many felt at the time was an excessive judicial concern for criminal rights. In those days, the liberal intellectual community felt that these protections, most famously expressed in the Miranda decision, had been late in coming and required defense against critics in law enforcement. When Dirty Harry appeared in 1971, the spirit of the sixties–generally anti-establishment, specifically anti-police–was still very much felt in the land.
But Kael gave him a bad, or at least excessive, rap. It is certainly true that Harry Callahan’s attempts to capture a psychopathic killer who is terrorizing San Francisco are constantly thwarted by a police bureaucracy bowing to liberal pressure and that he fails to observe all legal niceties in this case. Granted, Harry is not always–to put it mildly–careful in the way he expresses contempt for this caution, and he is not often delicate in his handling of suspects.
On the other hand, his willingness to take certain aspects of the law into his own hands fits well within a long tradition of rebelliousness against bureaucratic authority in police dramas. The cop who refuses to go entirely by the book is nearly always the hero in these films. Dirty Harry merely ratchets up the intensity of that very basic conflict. In any event, Kael was dead wrong about the nature of fascism: in its essence, fascism is bureaucracy gone mad, intruding into every aspect of ordinary life, and is, as this century’s history amply proves, a phenomenon of both the left and the right. Since Dirty Harry Callahan is at least as much against bureaucracy as he is against “coddling” criminals, he is manifestly an anti-fascist-some kind of instinctive libertarian more likely, and a man who judges his fellows on the basis of deeds rather than ideology.
As we look back on the film almost a quarter century later, we see two things: that at every level of society sympathy has switched decisively toward victim rights and away from criminal rights, which makes Harry Callahan look almost like a prophet; and that the violence of the movie, also much criticized at the time, looks mild in comparison to the preposterous firepower now routinely released in urban action films (Die Hard or Lethal Weapon films or almost anything starring Sylvester Stallone).
All of that aside, Harry’s undiminishable appeal lay not in his actions, or even in his “philosophy.” It was a matter of character. He was the ultimate blue-collar guy, stuck in a tough, underpaid, generally unrewarding job, harassed by fancy-talking, over-privileged bosses. The difference between him and the guys (and gals) in the audience is that he had the cheek and the gumption to talk back and to take muddled matters into his own hands, straightening them out without asking permission to do so. His lonely, loveless life, his bad wardrobe, his cruddy diet–these were the prices he paid for his independence and his devotion to duty, and people identified with that tradeoff, too.
Clint Eastwood understood this character. He had been raised in blue-collar Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, gone to a trade and technical high school, knew (and continued to respect) working-class people–their virtues, their frustrations, their outrages. Ultimately, that is what he thought this movie and all the Dirty Harry movies were most essentially about. And the other cops he has played–whether it was the drunken loser Ben Shockley in The Gauntlet or the sexually confused Wes Block in Tightrope–partook of these same characteristics. They were never smooth guys, or articulate guys. They weren’t even too smart. They just had good, sound instincts. These figures flattered them with understanding, but never toadied to them. Or talked down to them. No wonder Clint’s audience could never get enough of them.
“Action is character,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook when he was trying to master the screenwriter’s trade. But that is not always true. Sometimes in the movies, action is just action, and therefore becomes a frustration to players who regard themselves primarily as character actors.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a leading man,” Clint Eastwood once said, somewhat surprisingly, “though I guess at one time I was considered one… being one of the young guys boppin’ around town on a television series. But I always tried to be a character actor even then.”
Maintaining this identity was hard for Clint-casting directors couldn’t see beyond his good looks. Later, when he had established himself with Rawhide and the spaghetti westerns, agents and studio bosses wanted him to play straightforward heroic leads. That’s where the money is, after all. For a time, he obliged them–with Where Eagles Dare, Kelly’s Heroes, The Eiger Sanction–though he always alternated these big pictures with smaller, anti-heroic ventures like The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me (the first film he directed).
The more expensive, expansive films fulfilled their function of helping to establish Clint’s credentials as a star who could carry a big movie. Yet he always seems shy, almost self-effacing in these contexts, an actor more serious about his craft than he sometimes chooses to let on, in search of an author capable of giving him a real character to play. These movies–among which one should probably list Joshua Logan’s actionless but pricey musical, Paint Your Wagon–wear poorly precisely because they do not intelligently count the costs of heroism, of machismo, if you will. This is a subject that deeply interests Clint Eastwood, though it is not something he talks about much. But in these pictures, it is just an unexamined premise.
Clint meant to look into this matter more deeply in his own Firefox, but plot and special effects largely overrode his efforts. He did much better a little later with Heartbreak Ridge, which raucously, yet poignantly, asks what a lifelong soldier is supposed to do when he gets too old to fight in wars that are increasingly meaningless anyway. The same is true of White Hunter, Black Heart, in which a macho movie director must reexamine the noisy, careless audacity by which he has lived his life and managed his career. In these movies, the character actor has real characters to play–characters that in some ways subvert, or at least cause us to question, common (and superficial) assumptions about Clint Eastwood’s image. In his mind he has never been an action star any more than he has been a leading man, and without talking about it directly, he would like us to understand that.
“Did you once describe yourself as a bum and a drifter!” someone asked Clint Eastwood a decade ago. “No,” came the reply. “What are you, then?” “A bum and a drifter.”
Not really. Not in grown-up life, certainly. But as a child of the Depression, he was obliged to move about constantly as his father looked for work–most of it marginal–all over California. As a young man trying to find himself, Clint spent a couple of years drifting around, doing hard manual labor-lumberjacking, working in steel mills and aircraft factories. Moreover, his lifelong passion for jazz drew him at an early age into the low dives where the music he loved was played. All of this gave him the sympathetic sense of working-class life, neither patronizing nor indulgent, that marks some of his best, and possibly most enduring, work.
For most movie stars, humble beginnings are something to allude to briefly when an interviewer is looking for a little background story. Very few of them return to those beginnings in their work, and none have done so as consistently as Clint Eastwood. Just about everyone at the studio advised him not to do Every Which Way but Loose, his lowbrow comedy about Philo Beddoe, the bare-knuckle boxer whose best pal is Clyde, an affable orangutan. But Clint saw in the project something of his hang-out-with-the-guys past, and audiences found in this rough, funny, hugely profitable movie (and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can) a goofy, likable character they could more easily take to heart than, say, his grimly taciturn westerners or larger-than-life Dirty Harry Callahan.
Loose loosened Clint up. It made it possible for him to relax the set of his jaw, let the ice in his eyes melt a little, allow the droll side of his nature some play. The film helped launch a line of work that includes two films that Clint always lists among his own favorites: Bronco Billy, the story of an erstwhile New Jersey shoe salesman, honchoing his rag-tag Wild West Show along the backroads to nowhere; and Honkytonk Man, the tragi-comic saga of Red Stovall, a country singer whose largest talent is for self-destruction. Neither ranks among his most popular films, but both pay sweet tribute to the power of American dreaming. Both recognize, as most movies do not, that blue-collar people can be possessed by those dreams, too.
Directing for most movie stars is a sometimes thing, and more often than not is a form of self-indulgence. For Clint Eastwood, directing was something he was determined to do from his earliest days as an actor, and something he now perhaps needs to do more urgently than he needs to act. Woody Allen aside, no star has directed more often than he has–20 films–or with greater professionalism of the old-fashioned kind, which specifically rejects pride of auteurship. He is always on budget and usually ahead of schedule. Actors love working with him because, being an actor himself, he allows them to find their own way with just the occasional, supportive suggestion.
Clint learned to direct mainly by watching. Directors would come and go on Rawhide, the old pros and the young hotshots, the hacks and the caring craftsmen-and he studied them all. “The things that impress you, you remember and use yourself,” he has said, “and the things that don’t impress you, you discard.” Clint completed his education with Sergio Leone, whose talent for panorama admired, and with Don Siegel, the veteran American action director with whom he made five films. Unforgiven, the picture for which Clint won his directorial Oscar, is appropriately dedicated “To Sergio and Don.”
Of the two directors, the latter proved to be the more important influence. Clint, who is an impatient man, easily bored on a set, particularly loved Siegel’s quickness. “He knew exactly what he wanted to shoot, and he would do no more. His influence on me was being decisive in what you want to do and what your program is for the film. He was terrific that way.” Siegel, like most of the great American directors of the classic age, was a vernacularist, a man who worked in the humblest genres–westerns, crime stories, science fiction. He cook strength from their sturdy conventions, while imparting to them freshness, energy, and conviction, through his efficient staging, his brisk cutting, his inherent belief in the viability of the action tradition.
Most of Clint’s work has developed along these same lines. He started small with Play Misty for Me, a solid, scary story of obsessional love that he shot near his home in Carmel with a tiny cast (for luck, and in case he needed guidance he had Siegel play a small role in it). Next came Breezy, a sweet little May-September romance that starred William Holden and Kay Lent. He directed two other slightly more expansive films (High Plains Drifter and The Eiger Sanction) before tackling his first epic, The Outlaw Josey Wales, which is both a wonderfully confident film and the film that established beyond any doubt his credentials as a major director.
In the years since, Clint has directed just about every kind of movie–westerns, comedies, cop dramas, even a biopic–and it would be easy to categorize him simply as a genre director. But neither Pale Rider nor Unforgiven is a conventional western; Bronco Billy is unlike most contemporary comedies in both tone and topic; The Gauntlet, with its befuddled, loser hero, unlike most cop pictures; Bird, much darker, less celebratory and sentimental than most movie biographies of artists. Maybe Honkytonk Man is a road picture, maybe at heart Heartbreak Ridge is a service comedy, White Hunter, Black Heart, a safari adventure, The Bridges of Madison County, an old-fashioned romance. But none fits neatly into a broad genre category.
Bird and Unforgiven are the most profoundly surprising and the most personal of his films. The former, a biography of Charlie Parker, the self-taught, self-destructive musician making his way up out of rural poverty to play his revolutionary music in the jazz clubs during the ’40s and ’50s, is Clint’s weightiest movie. At once compassionate and objective, the film provides a meditation on the life and work of an artist that the director, himself a self-taught musician and a passionate devotee of modern jazz, admired from the first moment he heard him in concert in 1946. It pays full tribute to the man’s genius and the sweetness of his spirit, yet offers no easy excuses or sentimental explanations for his suicidal behavior. Bird is ultimately as Clint sees it, a tragedy about a man refusing to take responsibility for himself and his gifts–a quality that often elicits Clint’s puzzled reflections, precisely because it is the opposite of his own way.
Unforgiven can be read as a movie in which Clint acknowledges responsibility for certain aspects of his own life. In essence, it is a story about the ways that men drift into violence–through misunderstanding, through careless machismo, through misplaced pride and moral rigidity–and the costs, unacknowledged in most movies, including (as he said when he was making it) some of Clint’s own, of that behavior. It represents not an act of atonement, but rather a statement of self-awareness-brooding, ambiguous and, in the history of the western, quite singular in its immensity of emotion.
All of the films Clint has directed have in common a certain style and attitude-more of the latter than the former. In general, they possess a sort of unforced naturalism of manner that is glad to bend, even break, with strict realism as well as with strict generic conventions. Clint, the jazz aficionado, likes to riff, comedically or melodramatically, on a theme. He likes to do it straight-faced, effortlessly, without giving the audience a lot of warning or a lot of explanation when he does. Many times people miss the humor in what he does or the serious note he will sometimes strike without making too much of it. At heart, he is a subversive–an elusive director who does not care to be understood too quickly, who actually prefers not to let his hand show at all. That, too, follows in the old, pre-auteur tradition of American movie craftsmanship.
Trivia:
On May 11, 2007, Clint will be given an honourary doctorate degree of humane letters from the University of Southern California.
Clint Eastwood is an anagram for ‘old west action’.
Clint was listed in the #4 position in the annual Harris Poll of America’s top ten favourite movie stars in 2006.
In 2006, Clint’s performance as “Dirty” Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971) was ranked #92 on Premiere Magazine’s ‘100 Greatest Performances of All Time’.
Clint’s mother, Francesca Ruth Eastwood, died on 7 February 2006 at the age of ninety-seven.
In 2006, Clint was ranked #92 on Premiere Magazine’s ‘100 Greatest Performances of All Time’ for his performance as “Dirty” Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971).
In early 2005, Clint revealed that he would supply the voice for a Dirty Harry video game.
In 2005, Premiere Magazine ranked Clint as #43 on a list of the ‘Greatest Movie Stars of All Time’ in their ‘Stars in Our Constellation’ feature.
At the 2005 National Board of Review awards dinner in New York City, Clint joked that he would kill filmmaker Michael Moore if Moore ever showed up at his home with a camera (an evident reference to Moore’s controversial interview with Clint’s friend, actor/Second Amendment advocate Charlton Heston, for the movie Bowling for Columbine (2002)). After the crowd laughed, Clint said, “I mean it.” Moore’s spokesman said, “Michael laughed along with everyone else, and took Mr Eastwood’s comments in the light-hearted spirit in which they were given.” Publicly, Clint has not commented further.
Clint presented the Golden Globe Award for Best Director to Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Clint’s “Fistful” mannerisms was imitated in Canada, by the Tim Horton’s restaurant chain, to promote the 2005 Southwest chicken sub.
The boots that Clint wore in Unforgiven are the same boots that he wore in the TV series Rawhide. These boots are now a part of Clint’s private collection and were on loan to the 2005 Sergio Leone exhibit at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, California. In essence, these boots have book-ended Clint’s career in the Western genre.
For two consecutive years, Clint directed two out of the four actors in performances that won them Oscars: Sean Penn (Best Actor for Mystic River (2003)) and Tim Robbins (Best Supporting Actor for Mystic River (2003)) in 2004, and Hilary Swank (Best
Actress for Million Dollar Baby (2004)) and Morgan Freeman (Best Supporting Actor for Million Dollar Baby (2004)) in 2005.
Clint was the only nominee for the Best Actor Oscar in 2004 to play a fictitious character. All four other nominees portrayed real people in their respective films.
Clint whistles on the track Big Noise from his son Kyle’s jazz CD Paris Blue which was released in 2004.
Under Clint’s direction in 2003 and 2004 respectively, Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman both won Best Supporting Actor Oscars.
They were both first time winners, and had previously starred alongside each other in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
At a press conference for his movie, Mystic River (2003), Clint condemned the Iraq war as a “big mistake” and defended Sean Penn’s visit to Baghdad, saying he might have done the same thing but for his age.
Clint was sworn in as parks commissioner for the state of California at Big Basin Redwood Park, Santa Cruz, California, on 8th June 2002. Holding up his new commissioner’s badge, he told the crowd, “You’re all under arrest.”
Until his pride was displaced by discovery of a larger version of the same tree in 2002, Clint used to be the proud owner of the tree believed to be the nation’s largest known hardwood - a blue gum eucalyptus.
Clint received the Career Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2000.
At the 72nd Annual Academy Awards in 2000, Clint presented the Best Picture statuette for American Beauty (1999).
Clint received an honorary Doctorate from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 2000.
In 2000, Clint was the recipient of John F. Kennedy Center Honours.
Clint was offered Al Pacino’s role in Any Given Sunday (1999), but turned it down because Warner Bros. wouldn’t let him direct it as well.
In 1998, Clint received an honorary Cesar award in Paris, France for his body of work.
In October 1997, Clint was ranked #2 in Empire magazine’s “The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time” list.
In the late 1990s, Clint referenced Play Misty for Me (1971), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Bronco Billy (1980), Honkytonk Man (1982), Unforgiven (1992) & A Perfect World (1993) as the favourites of the films he had made.
Clint was cited as ‘America’s Favourite Movie Star’ by the Harris Polls conducted in 1993, 1994 and 1997. Tom Hanks and Harrison
Ford are the only other actors to be cited as the #1 Movie Star as many times.
Clint became President of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994.
Clint declined an offer from President George Bush to campaign for him in the 1992 Presidential election.
Clint appeared on T.G. Sheppard’s hit single Make My Day, which reached #12 on ‘Billboard’s Hot Country Singles’ chart in 1984 and also reached #62 on that magazine’s ‘Hot 100 singles’ survey.
Clint and former girlfriend, Sondra Locke, made six films together: Any Which Way You Can (1980), Bronco Billy (1980), Every
Which Way But Loose (1978), The Gauntlet (1977), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Sudden Impact (1983).
Clint was a partner with Sondra Locke from 1975 thru 1988. They co-habitated from 1977-1988.
Clint is mentioned in the theme song of the 1980s TV hit The Fall Guy.
In 1973, at the 45th Annual Academy Awards, Clint presented the 1972 Best Picture Oscar to Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather (1972). Thirty-two years later, they would jointly accept the 2004 Best Picture Oscar at the 77th Annual Academy
Awards, along with fellow Million Dollar Baby (2004) co-producer Tom Rosenberg.
In 1972, Clint attended President Richard Nixon’s landslide victory celebration in Los Angeles, along with John Wayne, Charlton Heston, and Glenn Ford.
Clint was appointed to serve on the National Council of the Arts by President Nixon in 1972.
When Don Siegel fell ill during production of Dirty Harry (1971), Clint stepped in as director during the attempted-suicide/jumper sequence.
Clint’s production company is ‘Malpaso Productions’, which he formed in 1968.
Clint claims that he wound up getting the role in Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari (1964) because James Coburn wanted $25,000. Clint accepted the role for $15,000.
Clint got his first acting role in 1959, with a role in Rawhide while visiting a friend at CBS, when a studio exec spotted him because he “looked like a cowboy”.
Clint’s first screen appearance was an uncredited role in Revenge of the Creature (1955), as the goofy white coated lab assistant who does the silly mouse gag in the lab scene with the monkey. His only line in the film is: “I’ve lost my white mouse”.
Two of Clint’s army pals convinced him to try acting. Clint took their advice and signed a contract with Universal Studios in 1954.
Whenever asked if he would do a Dirty Harry 6, Clint often joked that he can imagined Dirty Harry now longed retired, and fly-fishing with his .44 magnum.
Clint is a patron of the arts, notably as an avid collector of western art.
As a director, Clint has always refused, and refuses to this day, to test screen his films before their release.
Clint is a partial owner of the Pebble Beach Golf Country Club in Monterey Peninsula, California. Every year the PGA tour plays at the golf club, for a celebrity golf tournament where celebrities team up with the professionals. Clint has participated in this every year from 1962-2002 and has been the longest running participant. He now serves as Host.
Clint directed 8 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Gene Hackman, Meryl Streep, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, Morgan Freeman, Hilary Swank and himself (in Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004)). Hackman, Penn,
Robbins, Freeman and Swank won Oscars for their performances in one of Clint’s movies.
Clint was not nominated for an Academy Award, either as an actor or as a director, until he was sixty-two.
Clint objected to the end of Dirty Harry when Harry throws his badge away after killing the Scorpio Killer, arguing with director Don Siegel that Harry knew that being a policeman was the only work he was suited to. Siegel explained and eventually convinced Clint that Harry threw his badge away as a symbol that he had lost faith in the police system.
Clint has ruled out the possibility of playing Dirty Harry again, saying he has “outgrown him age-wise.”
Clint has been named to Quigley Publications’ annual Top 10 Poll of Money-Making Stars 21 times, making him #2 all-time for appearances in the top 10 list. Only John Wayne, with 25 appearances in the Top 10, has more. Eastwood, who first appeared in the Top Ten at #5 in 1968, finished #2 to Wayne at the box office in 1971 after finishing #2 to Paul Newman in 1970. After his first two consecutive #1 appearances in 1972 and 1973, he dropped back to #2 in 1974, trailing Robert Redford at the box office.
Clint was again #2 in 1979, 1981 and 1982 (topped by Burt Reynolds all three years), before leading the charts in 1983 and ‘84. He last topped the poll in 1993.
Clint has always disliked the reading of political and social agendas in his films, which has occurred from Dirty Harry to Million Dollar Baby. He has always maintained that all of his films are apolitical and what he has in mind when making a film is whether it’s going to be entertaining and compelling.
Clint is the owner of the exclusive golf club “Tehama” in Carmel Valley, California.
Although Clint has been associated with it throughout his career, he personally detests violence and has carefully shown the horrific consequences of violence in his more recent films such as Unforgiven (1992) , A Perfect World (1993), Absolute Power (1997), Mystic River (2003), and Million Dollar Baby (2004).
Clint refused to have children with his wife at first (although he did have a daughter in 1964 from an affair), but then she became very ill. Once she recovered, he changed his mind, and almost 15 years after they married, their first child together was born.
Clint was scheduled to play the villain ‘Two-Face’ in an episode of the Batman series, but the show was cancelled before the project began.
Clint was on a contract at Universal International. He and actor, Burt Reynolds, were released from their contracts and left the studio on the same day. They were both fired by the same director. Clint was fired when the director didn’t want to use him in a movie because “his Adam’s Apple was too big.” Burt, who was a stunt man at the time, was fired after he shoved the director into a water tank during an argument over how to do a stunt fall.
When directing, Clint simply says “okay” instead of “action” and “cut”.
When Clint directs, he insists that his actors wear as little makeup as possible and he likes to print first takes. As a result, his films consistently finish on schedule and on budget.
Clint is of a mixed heritage that includes Dutch, Scottish, Irish and English blood.
Clint’s current wife, Dina Ruiz (Dina Eastwood), is a former local television news anchor/reporter in California.
Clint weighed 11 lbs 6 oz at birth.
At the end of movies Clint directs, during the credits the camera will move around the location it was filmed in, then freeze-frame for the rest of the credits.
Clint was elected mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea in California.
Clint owns the Mission Ranch Inn in California.
When Clint was just starting out as an actor, he worked at digging swimming pools in between roles.
Clint served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He was stationed at Ft. Ord across from Monterey, California (over the hill from where he lives and served as mayor, Carmel-by-the-Sea) as a swimming instructor.
On leave as a G.I., his aeroplane crashed into the Pacific Ocean, forcing Clint to swim approx. three miles to shore. Following this,
Clint was given the job as boot camp swimming instructor and therefore confined to base.
Clint is a vegetarian.
Clint was ranked #50 on Premiere Magazine’s ‘100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time’ for his performance as ‘Blondie’ in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
The lead characters Clint plays in his movies are often lonely outsiders, with a dark past they would prefer to forget.
Clint’s movies usually begin and end with the death of one of the main characters.
The characters Clint plays always have a new trademark expression in each and every movie he does.
Clint usually uses shadow lighting in his films.
Some of Clint’s favorite movies are, The 39 Steps (1935), Sergeant York (1941), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), and Chariots of Fire (1981).
Clint’s favorite actors include Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, James Cagney and Robert Mitchum.
Clint took acting lessons in Hollywood. His teacher was Michael Chekhov.
Clint claims that the trait he most despises in others is racism.
Clint is good friends with Robert Donner.
Clint became the oldest person to ever win an Oscar for ‘Best Director’. He won the award for Million Dollar Baby at the age of 74.
Clint is 6′4 but because of back problems, he can now only stand up to 6′2.
Quotes:
“I was a teenager when the ‘Battle of Iwo Jima’ took place. I remember hearing about the bond drive and the need to maintain the war effort. Back then, people had just come through 10 years of a depression, and they were used to working for everything. I still have an image of someone coming to our house when I was about six years old, offering to cut and stack the wood in our back yard if my mother would make him a sandwich.”
(on how he decided to do “Per un pugno di dollari” in 1964)” I’d done Rawhide (1959) for about five years. The agency called and asked if I was interested in doing a western in Italy and Spain. I said, ‘Not particularly.’ They said, ‘Why don’t you give the script a quick look?’ Well, I was kind of curious, so I read it, and I recognized it right away as Yojimbo (1961), a Kurosawa film I had liked a lot. Over I went, taking the poncho with me - yeah the cape was my idea.”
“I think people jumped to conclusions about Dirty Harry without giving the character much thought, trying to attach right-wing connotations to the film that were never really intended. Both the director [Don Siegel] and I thought it was a basic kind of drama -what do you do when you believe so much in law and order and coming to the rescue of people and you just have five hours to solve a case? That kind of impossible effort was fun to portray, but I think it was interpreted as a pro-police point of view, as a kind of rightist heroism, at a time in American history when police officers were looked down on as ‘pigs’, as very oppressive people - I’m sure there are some who are, and a lot who aren’t. I’ve met both kinds.”
“I don’t like the wimp syndrome. No matter how ardent a feminist may be, if she is a heterosexual female, she wants the strength of a male companion as well as the sensitivity. The most gentle people in the world are macho males, people who are confident in their masculinity and have a feeling of well-being in themselves. They don’t have to kick in doors, mistreat women, or make fun of gays.”
“I’ve always supported a certain amount of gun control. I think California has always had a mandatory waiting period, so we were never concerned about it like the rest of the country. Some states didn’t have any at all. So I’ve always supported that. I think it’s very important that guns don’t get in the wrong hands, and, yes, I would support most of that. I don’t know too much about trigger locks. I’ve never really discussed that with anyone. But I do feel that guns - it’s very important to keep them out of the hands of felons or anyone who might be crazy with it.”
“I’ve thought about retiring for years now. When I did Play Misty for Me in 1970, I thought that if I could pull this off maybe I could step behind the camera, and it would be time to see the end of me. Every year I have threatened to do that - and here I am. So it may come sooner than you think.”
(on World War 2) “I feel terrible for both sides in that war and in all wars. A lot of innocent people get sacrificed. It’s not about winning or losing, but mostly about the interrupted lives of young people.”
“When I was doing The Bridges of Madison County (1995), I said to myself, this romantic ”
“I always cry when I watch myself on screen.”
(on former President Ronald Reagan) “Yes, I liked him very much. When he was a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, I don’t think he had the vast support that a lot of other presidents have had. So I don’t know why that is, it’s just the nature of things.”
“Every movie I make teaches me something, and that’s why I keep making them. I’m at that stage of life when I could probably stop and just hit golf balls. But in filming these two movies about Iwo Jima, I learnt about war and about character. I also learnt a lot about myself.”
“Guys I thought of as heroes were like Joe Louis and, maybe during the war, there was General Patton, of course, and maybe Eisenhower, who was the head of the allied forces. And Gary Cooper. There were just a handful of men and a handful of women. Now, people become stars who are just heiresses or something.”
“Most people who’ll remember me, if at all, will remember me as an action guy, which is OK. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there will be a certain group which will remember me for the other films, the ones where I took a few chances. At least, I like to think so.”
” I’ve actually had people come up to me and ask me to autograph their guns. ”
“The reason I became a Republican is because Eisenhower was running. A hero from World War II, a charismatic individual, a military man, a non-attorney - even then I liked that! I was a very young person voting for the first time. A lot of people joke that a conservative is a liberal who’s made his first $100,000 and then decides, wait a second, I want to save this, why are they taxing it away? Today the country’s in kind of a turmoil over taxing. Being raised in the thirties, watching my parents work hard to make ends meet, with jobs scarce, and then the war years - it tends to make a person a little more fiscally conscious than if you’ve been born into a wealthier family. You know, if you go to most people who are self-made and ask them what their political philosophy is, usually they’re a little more conservative than people who had a better start.”
“There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality. I got where I am by coming off the wall. I’ve always considered myself too individualistic to be either right-wing or left-wing.”
“I liked the Million Dollar Baby (2004) script a lot. Warner Bros. said the project had been submitted to them and they’d passed on it. I said, ‘But I like it.’ They said, ‘Well, it’s a boxing movie.’ And I said, ‘It’s not a boxing movie in my opinion. It’s a father-daughter love story, and it’s a lot of other things besides a boxing movie.’ They hemmed and hawed and finally said that if I wanted to take it, maybe they’d pay for the domestic rights only. After that, I’d be on my own. We took it to a couple of other studios, and they turned it down, much like Mystic River (2003) was turned down, the exact same pattern. People who kept calling and saying, ‘Come on, work with us on stuff.’ I’d give it to them, and they’d go, ‘Uh, we were thinking more in terms of Dirty Harry coming out of retirement.’ And who knows? Maybe when it comes out they’ll be proven right.”
“The Americans who went to Iwo Jima knew it would be a tough fight, but they always believed they’d win. The Japanese were told they wouldn’t come home - they were being sent to die for the Emperor. People have made a lot out of that very different cultural approach. But as I got into the storytelling for the two movies [Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)], I realised that the 19-year-olds from both sides had the same fears. They all wrote poignant letters home saying: “I don’t want to die.” They were all going through the same thing, despite the cultural differences.”
” None of the pictures I take a risk in cost a lot, so it doesn’t take much for them to turn a profit. We don’t deal in big budgets. We know what we want and we shoot it and we don’t waste anything. I never understand these films that cost twenty, thirty million dollars when they could be made for half that. Maybe it’s because no one cares. We care.”
“Plastic surgery used to be a thing where older people would try to go into this dream world of being 28 years old again. But now, in Hollywood, even people at 28 are having work done. Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life. But I figure I might as well just be what I am.”
“I think I’m on a track of doing pictures nobody wants to do, that they’re all afraid of. I guess it’s the era we live in, where they’re doing remakes of The Dukes of Hazzard (1979) and other old television shows. I must say, I’m not a negative person, but sometimes I wonder what kind of movies people are going to be making 10 years from now if they follow this trajectory. When I grew up there was such a variety of movies being made. You could go see Sergeant York (1941) or Sitting Pretty (1948) or Sullivan’s Travels (1941), dozens of pictures, not to mention all the great B movies. Now, they’re looking for whatever the last hit was. If it’s The Incredibles (2004), they want ‘The Double Incredibles‘. My theory is they ought to corral writers into writers’ buildings like they used to and start out with fresh material.”
“There’s really no way to teach you how to act, but there is a way to teach you how to teach yourself to act. That’s kind of what it is; once you learn the little tricks that work for you, pretty soon you find yourself doing that.”
“You have to trust your instincts. There’s a moment when an actor has it, and he knows it. Behind the camera you can feel the moment even more clearly. And once you’ve got it, once you feel it, you can’t second-guess yourself. You can find a million reasons why something didn’t work. But if it feels right, and it looks right, it works. Without sounding like a pseudointellectual dipshit, it’s my responsibility to be true to myself. If it works for me, it’s right.”
(his 2005 Academy Awards acceptance speech for Best Director)” Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I’d like to thank my wife, who is my best pal down here. And my mother, who was here with me in 1993. She was only 84 then. But she’s here with me again tonight. And she just — so, at 96, I’m thanking her for her genes. It was a wonderful adventure. It takes a — to make a picture in 37 days, it takes a well-oiled machine. And that well-oiled machine is the crew — the cast, of course, you’ve met a lot of them. But there’s still Margo and Anthony and Michael and Mike and Jay and everybody else who was so fabulous in this cast. And the crew, Campanelli. Billy Coe and, of course, Tom Stern, who is fantastic. And Henry Bumstead, the great Henry Bumstead who is the head of our crack geriatrics team. And Henry and Jack Taylor, and Dick Goddard, all those guys. Walt and everybody. I can’t think of everybody right now. I’m drawing a blank right now. But, Warren, you were right. And thank you, for your confidence earlier in the evening. I’m just lucky to be here. Lucky to be still working. And I watched Sidney Lumet, who is 80, and I figure, I’m just a kid. I’ll just — I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet. So thank you all very much. Appreciate it.”
“Growing up, I never knew what I wanted to do. I was not a terribly good student or a very vivacious, outgoing person. I was just kind of a backward kid. I grew up in various little towns and ended up in Oakland, California, going to a trade school. I didn’t want to be an actor, because I thought an actor had to be an extrovert - somebody who loved to tell jokes and talk and be a raconteur. And I was something of an introvert. My mother used to say: “You have a little angel on your shoulder.” I guess she was surprised I grew up at all, never mind that I got to where I am. The best I can do is quote a line from Unforgiven (1992): “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.””
“As for me, I like being behind the camera instead of in front of it. I can wear what I want. Will I act again? I never say never. I like doing things where I can stretch and go in different directions. I’m not looking to take it easy. Like the Marines on Iwo Jima, I understand that if you really want something, you have to be ready to fight.”
“At the studios, everybody’s into sequels or remakes or adaptations of old TV shows. I don’t know if it’s because of the corporate environment or they’re just out of ideas. Pretty soon, they’re going to be wanting to do one on Rawhide (1959).”
” Life is a constant class, and once you think you know it all, you’re due to decay. You’re due to slide. I have to keep challenging myself and try something I haven’t done before. The studios aren’t always happy with that. When I wanted to make Mystic River (2003), the studio said: “Uh-oh, it’s so dark.” And I said: “Well, it’s important. And it’s a nice story.” Then the next movie, Million Dollar Baby (2004), they said: “Who wants to see a picture about a girl boxing?” And I said: “It’s really a father-daughter love story. Boxing just happens to be what’s going on. They didn’t have much faith. So there are always obstacles and people afraid to take risks. That’s why you end up with remakes of old TV shows as movies. But playing it safe is what’s risky, because nothing new comes out of it.”
“One of the first films I went to - I went with my dad because my mother didn’t want to go see a war movie - was Sergeant York (1941). My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from the first world war. It was directed by Howard Hawks. That was when I first became aware of movies, who made them, who was involved.”
(on directing) “Most people like the magic of having it take a long time and be difficult… But I like to move along, I like to keep the actors feeling like they’re going somewhere, I like the feeling of coming home after every day and feeling like you’ve done something and you’ve progressed somewhere. And to go in and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o’clock and then go home is not my idea of something to do.”
“I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.”
“I’ve done a lot of violent movies, especially in the early days. My recent efforts, like The Bridges of Madison County (1995), weren’t too violent. In recent years I’ve done less, and, yes, I am concerned about violence in film. In ‘92, when I did Unforgiven (1992), which is a film that had a very anti-violence and anti-gun play - anti-romanticizing of gun play theme, I remember that Gene Hackman was concerned about it, and we both discussed the issue of too much violence in films. It’s escalated ninety times since Dirty Harry (1971) and those films were made.”
“I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn’t. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was.”
“I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead.”
“I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life.”
“My father used to say to me, ‘Show ‘em what you can do, and don’t worry about what you’re gonna get. Say you’ll work for free and make yourself invaluable.’”
“The less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.”
“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.”
“My old drama coach used to say, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Gary Cooper wasn’t afraid to do nothing.”
“Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.”
“Nowadays you’d have many battles before you blow it up, but eventually you’d take it down. And that’s okay, I don’t heavily quarrel with that, for me personally, having made films for years and directed for 33 years, it just seems to me that I long for people who want to see a story and see character development. Maybe we’ve dug it out and there’s not really an audience for that, but that’s not for me to really worry about.”
“Right now, the state of the movies in America, there’s an awful lot of people hanging on wires and floating across things and comic book characters and what have you. There seems to be a lot of big business in that, a nice return on some of those.”
“I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.”
(To Eli Wallach prior to starting work on Buono,Il Brutto,Il Cattivo,Il in 1966) “Never trust anyone on an Italian movie. I know about these things. Stay away from special effects and explosives.”
“The plan was, when I first started directing in the 1970’s,to get more involved in production and directing so at some point in my life, when I decided I didn’t want to act any more, I didn’t have to suit up.”
“They say marriages are made in Heaven, but so is thunder and lightning.”
“I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed.”
“When I was young, movie stars who were celebrities were just a handful. Now everybody is a star, so you have to make superstars. Stars are just heiresses like Paris Hilton.”
Filmography:
Clint Eastwood’s Filmography as an actor:
2007 Dirt Harry
2005 The Spaghetti West
2004 Epreuves d’Artistes
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2002 Blood Work
2001 Kurosawa
2000 Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows
2000 Space Cowboys
1999 Forever Hollywood
1999 True Crime
1998 Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years
1997 Eastwood on Eastwood
1997 Absolute Power
1996 AFI Lifetime Achievement Awards: Clint Eastwood
1995 Casper
1995 A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies
1995 Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick
1995 The Bridges of Madison County
1994 Don’t Pave Main Street: Carmel’s Heritage
1993 In the Line of Fire
1993 A Perfect World
1992 Unforgiven
1991 Hollywood Remembers: Gary Cooper - American Life, American Legend
1990 The Rookie
1990 White Hunter, Black Heart
1990 Hollywood Remembers [Video Series]
1989 Pink Cadillac
1988 Stars of the Century
1988 The Dead Pool
1987 Wild West
1986 Heartbreak Ridge
1985 Pale Rider
1984 City Heat
1984 Tightrope
1983 Sudden Impact
1982 Honkytonk Man
1982 Firefox
1980 Bronco Billy
1980 Any Which Way You Can
1979 Escape from Alcatraz
1978 Every Which Way But Loose
1977 The Gauntlet
1976 The Enforcer
1976 The Outlaw Josey Wales
1975 The Eiger Sanction
1974 Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
1973 High Plains Drifter
1973 Magnum Force
1972 Joe Kidd
1971 Dirty Harry
1971 Play Misty for Me
1970 Kelly’s Heroes
1970 The Beguiled
1970 Two Mules for Sister Sara
1969 Paint Your Wagon
1968 Hang ‘em High
1968 Where Eagles Dare
1968 Coogan’s Bluff
1966 Le Streghe
1966 Buono, Il brutto, Il cattivo, Il (The Good, The Bad & The Ugly)
1966 Death Valley Days: Deadly Decision
1965 For a Few Dollars More
1964 A Fistful of Dollars
1959 Rawhide: Incident of Iron Bull
1959 Rawhide [TV Series]
1959 Maverick: Duel at Sundown
1959 Rawhide - The Collector’s Edition
1958 Ambush at Cimarron Pass
1958 Lafayette Escadrille
1957 Maverick [TV Series]
1957 Escapade in Japan
1956 Away All Boats
1956 Star in the Dust
1956 Never Say Goodbye
1956 The First Traveling Saleslady
1955 Lady Godiva
1955 Revenge of the Creature
1955 Francis in the Navy
1955 Tarantula
Clint Eastwood’s Filmography as a Composer (Music Score)
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2003 Mystic River
1993 A Perfect World
Clint Eastwood’s Filmography as a Director
2006 Flags of Our Fathers
2006 Red Sun, Black Sand
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2003 The Blues: Piano Blues
2003 Mystic River
2002 Blood Work
2000 Space Cowboys
1999 True Crime
1997 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
1997 Absolute Power
1995 The Bridges of Madison County
1993 A Perfect World
1992 Unforgiven
1990 White Hunter, Black Heart
1990 The Rookie
1988 Bird
1986 Heartbreak Ridge
1985 Pale Rider
1983 Sudden Impact
1982 Honkytonk Man
1982 Firefox
1980 Bronco Billy
1977 The Gauntlet
1976 The Outlaw Josey Wales
1975 The Eiger Sanction
1973 Breezy
1973 High Plains Drifter
1971 Play Misty for Me
Clint Eastwood’s Filmography as an Executive Producer:
1998 Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years
1988 Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
1975 The Eiger Sanction
Clint Eastwood’s Filmography as a Producer:
2006 Flags of Our Fathers
2006 Red Sun, Black Sand
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2003 The Blues: Piano Blues
2003 Mystic River
2002 Blood Work
2000 Space Cowboys
1999 True Crime
1997 Absolute Power
1997 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
1995 The Bridges of Madison County
1995 The Stars Fell on Henrietta
1993 A Perfect World
1992 Unforgiven
1990 White Hunter, Black Heart
1988 Bird
1988 Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
1986 Heartbreak Ridge
1985 Pale Rider
1984 Tightrope
1983 Sudden Impact
1982 Firefox
1982 Honkytonk Man
Clint Eastwood’s Filmography as a Songwriter
1984 City Heat
Clint Eastwood Awards:
2004
Million Dollar Baby
Win: Best Director, Academy Awards
Runner-Up: Best Actor, Academy Awards
Win: Best Director, Seattle Film Critics
Win: Best Director, San Diego Film Critics Association
Win: Best Director, Chicago Film Critics
Win: Best Director, New York Film Critics
Win: Best Director, Golden Globes
Win: Best Director, Directors’ Guild
Runner-Up: Best Director, Online Film Critics Association
Runner-Up: Best Director, Broadcast Film Critics Association
Runner-Up: Best Actor, National Society of Film Critics
Runner-Up: Best Director, National Society of Film Critics
Runner-Up: Best Director, Southeastern Film Critics Association
2003
Mystic River
Runner-Up: Best Director, Academy Awards
Win: Best Director, National Society of Film Critics
Runner-Up: Best Director, Broadcast Film Critics Association
Runner-Up: Best Director, Chicago Film Critics
Runner-Up: Best Director, Directors’ Guild
Runner-Up: Best Director, Online Film Critics Association
Runner-Up: Best Director, Golden Globes
Runner-Up: Best Director, Washington (DC) Area Film Critics Association
Runner-up: Best Director, BOP’s Calvin Awards
Runner-Up: Best Director, Golden Satellites
Nominee: Best Director, London Film Critics
1992
Unforgiven
Win: Best Director, Academy Awards
Runner-Up: Best Actor, Academy Awards
Win: Best Director, Directors’ Guild
Win: Best Director, Los Angeles Film Critics
Win: Best Actor, Los Angeles Film Critics
Win: Best Director, National Society of Film Critics
Win: Best Director, Golden Globes
1988
Bird
Win: Best Director, Golden Globes
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