Clint Eastwood
Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born on May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, California. Before making it to Hollywood in the mid ’50s, he worked a number of dead-end, unskilled jobs, served in the U.S. Army, and dropped out of Los Angeles City College where he was pursuing a business-related degree. He married Maggie Johnson in December 1953, and the couple had two children, son Kyle (born 1968) and daughter Alison (born 1972).
In 1955, Eastwood landed a contract with Universal Pictures and got bit parts in B-movies such as Tarantula, Revenge of the Creature and Francis in the Navy, in which he appeared with the famous “talking mule.” Universal soon dropped him, but his luck changed after a CBS executive spotted him on the studio’s lot in 1959. The exec, who thought Eastwood looked like a real cowboy, signed him to star on TV’s Rawhide. He would play the character Rowdy Yates for the next seven years, becoming a household name in the process.
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 1958, he got his first starring role in a feature film, Ambush at Cimarron Pass, which he has dismissed as “probably the lousiest Western ever made.” 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.
Eastwood, who stands at 6 ft 4 inches (193 cm), 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 and bounty hunter 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 (1968), in which Eastwood was a lonely deputy 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 musical, albeit a western musical.
Credit : Wikipedia
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