Clint Eastwood
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A look at the fascinating life of this talented actor, renowned for his way-out-west rugged charm and his portrayal of Dirty Harry.
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born: 31-05-1930
birth place: San Francisco, California
A fashionable thing for TV stars to do during this period was to release a pop record (providing you could actually sing!). When Rawhide limped into its seventh series, Clint Eastwood was keen to diversify and decided to put his vocals recording three pop songs, called Unknown Girl, Rowdy, and For You, and For Me, For Evermore. An LP was later released called Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favourites, which was perhaps not the most memorable and inspiring record of 1962.
After Rawhide, Eastwood landed the role as “The Man With No Name” in the Dollars’ trilogy, which would lead him to stardom in the ‘spaghetti westerns’. Italian director, Sergio Leone desperately wanted to cast Henry Fonda or Charles Bronson for the lead, but he was on a very tight budget and simply couldn’t afford them. Eastwood agreed to take $15,000 and off he went to Spain, poncho in toe, to film A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Leone’s trademark style of using little dialogue, extreme close-ups and a sense of gritty realism, suited Eastwood’s style of acting perfectly and the film was a surprise box-office smash.
The next two films in Leone’s trilogy, For a Few Dollars, (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, (1966), received considerably more funding due to the success of the first film. All three of Leone’s films were a commercial success in both Europe and the US. On returning home from Spain and Italy in 1966, Eastwood had become a fully-fledged movie star, the only post-1960 Hollywood cowboy.
Eastwood went on to star in another western, Hang ‘Em High (1967) and then, in Coogan’s Bluff (1968), where he played a deputy chief who doesn’t get on with his boss, and doesn’t do things by the book. This film marked the beginning of a long and prosperous collaboration with director, Don Siegel.
After starring with Richard Burton in Where Eagles Dare (1968), and performing in the musical, Paint Your Wagon, Eastwood became irritated about how much money was being wasted during the making of such productions. He longed for more creative control of the movies in which he starred and so he decided to form his own production company. In 1968, Malpaso Productions was born.
Malpaso – known as ‘bad step’ in Spanish - is derived from the name of a creek, south of Carmel, where Eastwood spent much of his life. The name came to him after recalling the time his agent warned him not to agree to work on the Dollars’ trilogy, saying it would be a ‘bad step’. An ironic but funny choice.
Malpaso’s first film, directed by Don Siegel, was The Beguiled: The Storyteller (1971), ranked by many critics as a veritable work of art. Based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan, it tells the story of an injured Civil War bluecoat who is given sanctuary in a girl’s finishing school. 1971 was a productive year for Eastwood. Not only was Don Siegel directing Malpaso’s first movie, Eastwood finally got to direct his first film, a thriller called Play Misty For Me (1971), in which he plays an affable DJ stalked by an obsessed female fan.
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