Clint Eastwood

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.

[edit] 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 ten-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 humor. 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. 1971 proved to be the biggest year yet for his career. He directed and starred 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. This film was done before the advent of CGI, so everything you see is real.

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 Every Which Way But Loose and 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.