Clint Eastwood: Cowboy On-Screen And In Director's Chair

May 31, 2020 by apost team

Academy Award-winning legend Clint Eastwood turned 90 today. After making a name for himself acting in Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti western” trilogy A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eastwood became one of Hollywood’s most respected directors with critically acclaimed films like Million Dollar Baby. To commemorate Eastwood’s 90th birthday, we’ll look back on the star’s early life along with highlights from his six-decade career.

Whereas some Hollywood greats get their first taste of showbusiness early on in life, Eastwood had to endure the worst years of The Great Depression since he was born on May 31st, 1930 in San Francisco, CA. While his family initially traveled and looked for work during this period, they eventually settled in Piedmont, where Eastwood would graduate from high school in 1949, according to Biography.com.

However, it wasn’t until after graduating and serving in the military that Eastwood found his way to Los Angeles where he first starred in movies like Revenge of the Creature and Francis in the Navy. Despite landing only minor roles at first, and despite having little acting practice, Eastwood got his big break when he was cast in the TV Western Rawhide in 1958, according to Biography.com. Eastwood’s role as a handsome, no-nonsense cowboy threw the young actor into the spotlight, and from then on he continued to land similar parts in westerns and gritty action films like Dirty Harry in the 1970s.

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One of Eastwood’s more modern classics is Million Dollar Baby, which he both directed and starred in as a cantankerous boxing trainer who trains a waitress from the Ozarks to be a prize-winning athlete. Not only did the film win a number of Oscars, as Biography.com reports—Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards for Eastwood and Oscars for actors Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman—but the film also received widespread critical acclaim in the press. 

The late film critic Roger Ebert called the film “a masterpiece,” writing that “the film is Eastwood's 25th film as a director, and his best [...the film] finds the simplicity and directness of classical storytelling; it is the kind of movie where you sit very quietly in the theater and are drawn deeply into lives that you care very much about.”

After such a long, prolific career in Hollywood, it’s tempting to ask whether Eastwood might be thinking about retirement, especially following his 90th birthday. However, Eastwood shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, Eastwood’s most recent project was the 2018 crime film The Mule, in which the then 88-year-old both directed and starred. As recently as January of this year, Eastwood put rumors of his retirement to rest yet again.

“I like doing it, it’s nice to be able to have a paying job,” Eastwood told presenter Alison Hammond on the U.K. TV show This Morning in January. “I like being in films, I like making films and I started directing films because I thought one day I’m going to look up on screen and say, ‘that’s enough Eastwood, you’d better do something else.’ So I thought, ‘If I direct, I can let other people be on screen.’”

With that attitude, who knows? Maybe another Eastwood masterpiece is right around the corner.

Happy birthday, Clint Eastwood! What's your favorite Clint Eastwood movie? Sound off in the comments and pass this on to friends and family members to commerate Eastwood's legendary career in Hollywood.