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Actor, director, producer.
Born Clinton Eastwood, Jr., on May 31, 1930, to Clinton, Sr. and Ruth Eastwood. He
has one older sister, Jean. After traveling and looking for work throughout
California during the Depression, the family settled in Oakland, where Eastwood
graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1948.
Eastwood
worked odd jobs as a hay bailer, logger, truck driver, and steel-furnace stoker. In
1950, he was called to military duty with the Army Special Services, based at Ford
Ord in Monterey, California. While in the Army, Eastwood met actors David Janssen
and Martin Milner, who convinced him to move to Los Angeles in 1954 after he
finished his military duty. Eastwood took a screen test and signed a contract with
Universal for seventy-five dollars a week. His first roles were in the science
fiction films
Revenge of the Creature (1955), and
Tarantula (1955). Eastwood's rugged looks landed him the role of Rowdy
Yates in the CBS TV series
Rawhide (1959), which ran for eight seasons.
In 1964, he
went to Italy to star in a trio of westerns directed by Sergio Leone. The role
Eastwood took—the cool, laconic "Man with No Name"—had been turned down by James
Coburn and Charles Bronson. The films included
A Fistful
Of Dollars (1964) (a remake of the classic
Yojimbo),
For a Few Dollars More (1965), and
The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Nicknamed "spaghetti westerns"
due to their Italian production, these films gained worldwide popularity and
Eastwood became internationally known.
Back in the
United States, he directed his first film, the thriller
Play Misty For Me (1971), and starred in the leading role. His next
important project was a series of violent action movies portraying Harry Callahan,
a contentious San Francisco cop. The
Dirty Harry series proved immensely popular with the public and
included five films over a period of seventeen years, including
Dirty Harry (1971),
Magnum Force (1973),
The Enforcer (1976),
Sudden Impact (1983), and
The Dead Pool (1988).
Eastwood then
started directing, winning critical acclaim for the Charlie Parker
biography,
Bird (1988). He also earned accolades for directing and
producing the 1992 Western
Unforgiven, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. He directed
and starred in
A Perfect World (1993);
The Bridges of Madison County (1994) with Meryl Streep; and
Absolute Power (1997). He directed (but did not appear in)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997); and produced, directed
and starred in the thriller
True Crime (1999).
August of
2000 saw the release of his directorial and acting project,
Space Cowboys, costarring James Garner, Donald Sutherland, and Tommy
Lee Jones. In 2003, he released the haunting and award-winning directorial effort
Mystic River starring Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. Eastwood won both an
Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Director for
Million Dollar Baby starring Hilary Swank two years later. The film
also won the Best Picture Oscar. That same year, he received the Life Achievement
Award from the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles.
Flags of Our Fathers and
Letters From Iwo Jima. These companion films viewed the conflict from
two distinctly different perspectives.
Flags of Our Fathers explored the American side, telling the story of
one man’s efforts to learn more about his father’s involvement in the raising of
the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima—a moment captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.
The film featured a number of young Hollywood actors, including Ryan Phillippe,
Jesse Bradford, and Paul Walker. Truly multitalented, Eastwood wrote some of the
music for the film.
Drawing from
correspondence found on that island battlefield,
Letters of Iwo Jima looks at the experiences of Japanese soldiers there
during the war. While both films earned a lot of praise,
Letters from Iwo Jima garnered four Academy Award nominations,
including Best Picture and Eastwood’s fourth nod for Best
Director.
Next for
Eastwood is the family dramatic thriller
The Changeling, which stars Angelina Jolie as a mother of a kidnapped
child. Her character suspects that the child who is eventually returned to her is
not, in fact, her son. Based on a true story, the film is set for an October 2008
release.
Outside of
acting, Eastwood has tried his hand at politics. He was elected mayor of Carmel,
California, in 1986, serving two years.
Eastwood has
been married only twice, but had a number of relationships and fathered several
children out of wedlock. He was married to Maggie Johnson between 1953 and 1980.
They had two children, Alison (1972) and Kyle (1968). While married to Johnson, he
had a child by Roxanne Tunis: Kimber Eastwood (1964). He became romantically
involved starting in 1975 with costar Sondra Locke, which ended bitterly with a
palimony suit in 1989. He is the father of two children by Jacelyn Reeves: Kathryn
(1988) and Scott (1986). He and Frances Fisher had a daughter, Francesca Ruth. He
married Tina Ruiz, a TV newscaster, in 1996. They had a daughter, Morgan, in
December 1996.
Source : Some of the
information on this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed
under the GNU Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Clint Eastwood -
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