Appendix 20
Clint Eastwood
Movie Star
and
Influential Jazz Aficionado
Clinton Eastwood Jr. (b. May 31, 1930, San Francisco, California), an American actor and film director who, after achieving success in the Western television series Rawhide, rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" of Spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as anti-hero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
Eastwood's greatest commercial successes are the adventure comedy Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its action-comedy sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980). Other popular Eastwood films include the Westerns Hang 'Em High (1968) and Pale Rider (1985), the action-war film Where Eagles Dare (1968), the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979), the war film Heartbreak Ridge (1986), the action film In the Line of Fire (1993), and the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995). More recent works include Gran Torino (2008), The Mule (2018), and Cry Macho (2021). Since 1967, Eastwood's company Malpaso Productions has produced all but four of his American films.
An Academy Award nominee for Best Actor, Eastwood won Best Director and Best Picture for his Western film Unforgiven (1992) and for his sports drama Million Dollar Baby (2004). In addition to directing many of his own star vehicles, Eastwood has also directed films in which he did not appear, such as the mystery drama Mystic River (2003) and the war film Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), for which he received Academy Award nominations. He also directed the biographical films Changeling (2008), Invictus (2009), American Sniper (2014), Sully (2016), and Richard Jewell (2019).
Eastwood's accolades include four Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, three Cesar Awards, and an AFI (American Film Institute) Life Achievement Award. In 2000, Eastwood received the Italian Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion award, honoring his lifetime achievements. Bestowed two of France's highest civilian honors, he received the Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1994, and the Legion of Honour in 2007.
Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, California, to Ruth (nee Runner; 1909–2006) and Clinton Eastwood (1906–1970). During her son's fame, Ruth was known by the surname of her second husband, John Belden Wood (1913–2004), whom she married after the death of Clinton Sr. Eastwood was nicknamed "Samson" by hospital nurses because he weighed 11 pounds 6 ounces (5.2 kg) at birth. He has a younger sister, Jeanne Bernhardt (b. 1934). He is of English, Irish, Scottish, and Dutch ancestry and is descended from Mayflower passenger William Bradford, and through this line is the 12th generation born in North America.
Eastwood's family relocated three times during the 1930s as his father changed occupations. Contrary to what Eastwood has indicated in media interviews, they did not move between 1940 and 1949. Instead, the family settled in Piedmont, California, where they lived in an affluent area of the town, had a swimming pool, belonged to a country club, and each parent drove their own car. Eastwood's father was a manufacturing executive at Georgia-Pacific for most of his working life. As Clint and Jeanne grew older, Ruth took a clerical job at IBM.
Eastwood attended Piedmont Middle School, where he was held back due to poor academic scores, and records indicated he also had to attend summer school. From January 1945 until at least January 1946, he attended Piedmont High School, but was asked to leave for writing an obscene suggestion to a school official on the athletic field scoreboard and burning an effigy on the school lawn, on top of other school infractions. He transferred to Oakland Technical High School and was scheduled to graduate mid-year in January 1949, although it is not clear if he did.
Eastwood held a number of jobs, including lifeguard, paper carrier, grocery clerk, forest firefighter, and golf caddy. Eastwood tried to enroll at Seattle University in 1951, but instead was drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War. However, Eastwood did not go to Korea. He spent his time in service as a lifeguard at Fort Ord, near Monterey in northern California for his entire stint in the military. Eastwood was discharged in February 1953.
Following his discharge from the army in 1953, Eastwood moved to Hollywood. A screen test with Universal in 1954 netted him a 40-week contract, but, after one renewal and a series of bit parts in such movies as Tarantula (1955) and Revenge of the Creature (1955), his option was dropped. He appeared in several television series before he got his big break in 1959 by being cast as Rowdy Yates in the popular television western series Rawhide (1959–65).
Eastwood achieved international stardom during this same period when he played The Man with No Name—a laconic, fearless gunfighter whose stoicism masks his brutality—in three Italian westerns (popularly known as "spaghetti westerns") directed by Sergio Leone: Per un pugno di dollari (1964; A Fistful of Dollars), Per qualche dollari in più (1965; For a Few Dollars More), and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). In 1967, the three films played in the United States and were immediate commercial successes, establishing Eastwood as a box-office star.
For Eastwood’s first American western, Hang ’Em High (1968) — Ted Post’s expert imitation of the Leone formula, enlivened by a superior group of character actors — Eastwood formed his own production company, Malpaso. He also worked with Don Siegel on the popular police story Coogan's Bluff (1968). It was Siegel who taught Eastwood most of what he needed to know about directing, a debt Eastwood often acknowledged. He also worked with Siegel on the western Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), the psychological Civil War drama The Beguiled (1971), and the prison-break film Escape from Alcatraz (1979). Their best-known collaboration was Dirty Harry (1971), in which Eastwood first portrayed the ruthlessly effective neo-noir police inspector Harry Callahan. The film proved to be one of Eastwood’s most successful films, spawning four sequels and establishing the no-nonsense character Dirty Harry—known for such catchphrases as “Go ahead, make my day”—as a cinema icon.
In the 1970s, Eastwood turned to directing in such films as the thriller Play Misty for Me (1971), the westerns High Plains Drifter (1972) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and the espionage thriller The Eiger Sanction (1975), all films in which he also played leading roles. Eastwood took over the western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) from Philip Kaufman, who cowrote the story of a Missouri farmer driven to violence after his family has been slaughtered by renegade Union soldiers. Stylishly photographed by Bruce Surtees, with a fine performance by Chief Dan George as a Cherokee elder, this work humanized Eastwood’s mythic avenger archetype for the first time.
Eastwood went on to make The Gauntlet (1977), a kinetic but formulaic action film in which he played a police detective trying to transport a witness (Sondra Locke) to an Arizona courthouse where she can testify. The gentle good humor pervading Bronco Billy (1980) was far removed from the mayhem of his westerns and cop movies; Eastwood was deft as the proprietor of a two-bit Wild West show who gives shelter to, then falls in love with, a runaway heiress (Locke). Firefox (1982) was a high-tech Cold War story that had Eastwood as a pilot stealing a supersonic jet from the Soviets. The whimsical and sentimental Honkytonk Man (1982), set during the Great Depression, featured Eastwood as a country singer dying of tuberculosis whose dream is to make it to the Grand Ole Opry before he passes on.
Having wandered rather far afield from his star action persona, Eastwood directed the fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), with Locke portraying a rape victim on a vengeful murder spree. He then returned to his screen roots with the neo-mythic Pale Rider (1985), a quasi-religious western. It showcased Eastwood’s iconic presence and Surtees’s gorgeous photography and was one of the few hit westerns of the 1980s.
Heartbreak Ridge (1986) was a drama about an old-school marine sergeant (Eastwood) on the verge of retirement whose tough approach whips a group of raw recruits into shape for the invasion of Grenada.
Off-screen, Eastwood made national headlines in 1986 when he was elected Mayor of Carmel, California. He served for two years.
A lifelong devotee of jazz and an accomplished pianist, Eastwood also directed the well-regarded Bird (1988), a film biography of saxophonist Charlie Parker (played by Forest Whitaker), and produced the documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988).
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Eastwood was an aficionado of jazz particularly bebop, blues, country and western and classical music. He dabbled in music early on by developing as a boogie-woogie pianist and had originally intended to pursue a career in music by studying for a music theory degree after graduating from high school. In late 1959, Eastwood produced the album Cowboy Favorites, released on the Cameo label, which included some classics such as Bob Wills' "San Antonio Rose" and Cole Porter's "Don't Fence Me In". Despite his attempts to plug the album by going on a tour, it never reached the Billboard Hot 100. In 1963, Cameo producer Kal Mann told Eastwood that "he would never make it big as a singer". Nevertheless, during the off season of filming Rawhide, Eastwood and Paul Brinegar – sometimes joined by Sheb Wooley – toured rodeos, state fairs, and festivals. In 1962, their act, entitled Amusement Business Cavalcade of Fairs, earned them as much as $15,000 a performance.
Although he never made it as a major performing artist, Eastwood passed on his musical proclivities to his son, Kyle, who became a professional jazz bassist and composer.
An audiophile, Eastwood owned an extensive collection of LPs which he played on a Rockport turntable. His favorite musicians include saxophonists Charlie Parker and Lester Young, pianists Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, and Fats Waller, and Delta bluesman Robert Johnson.
Eastwood developed his own Warner Brothers Records-distributed imprint, Malpaso Records, as part of his deal with Warner Brothers. This deal was unchanged when Warner Music Group was sold by Time Warner to private investors. Malpaso Records, which released all of the scores of Eastwood's films from The Bridges of Madison County onward, also released the album of a 1996 jazz concert he hosted, titled Eastwood after Hours – Live at Carnegie Hall.
Eastwood composed the film scores of Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Grace Is Gone, Changeling, Hereafter, J. Edgar, and the original piano compositions for In the Line of Fire. He wrote and performed the song heard over the credits of Gran Torino and also co-wrote "Why Should I Care" with Linda Thompson and Carole Bayer Sager, a song recorded in 1999 by Diana Krall
The music in Grace Is Gone received two Golden Globe nominations by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for the 65th Golden Globe Awards. Eastwood was nominated for Best Original Score, while the song "Grace is Gone" with music by Eastwood and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager was nominated for Best Original Song. It won the Satellite Award for Best Song at the 12th Satellite Awards. Changeling was nominated for Best Score at the 14th Critics' Choice Awards, Best Original Score at the 66th Golden Globe Awards, and Best Music at the 35th Saturn Awards. On September 22, 2007, Eastwood was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree from the Berklee College of Music at the Monterey Jazz Festival, on which he served as an active board member. Upon receiving the award, Eastwood gave a speech claiming, "It's one of the great honors I'll cherish in this lifetime."
The scoring stage at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, California, was renamed the Eastwood Scoring Stage in the 1990s.
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One of the greatest contributions to music made by Clint Eastwood was his discovery of the great Roberta Flack and by his utilizing her classic song "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in his first (his 1971) directorial effort, the movie Play Misty for Me.
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was originally a 1957 folk song written by British political singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, who later became MacColl's wife. At the time, the couple were lovers, although MacColl was still married to his second wife, Jean Newlove. Seeger sang the song when the duo performed in folk clubs around Britain. During the 1960s, it was recorded by various folk singers and became a major international hit for Roberta Flack in 1972, winning Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Billboard ranked it as the number one Hot 100 single of the year for 1972.
There are two differing accounts of the origin of the song. MacColl said that he wrote the song for Seeger after she asked him to pen a song for a play she was in. He wrote the song and taught it to Seeger over the telephone. Seeger said that MacColl, with whom she had begun an affair in 1957, used to send her tapes to listen to while they were apart and that "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was on one of them.
The earliest recording of the song was in 1960 by Bonnie Dobson, released in 1961 on her debut album She's Like a Swallow and Other Folk Songs. The song entered the pop mainstream the following year when it was released by the Kingston Trio on their 1962 hit album New Frontier and in subsequent years by other pop folk groups such as Peter, Paul and Mary; the Brothers Four; Joe and Eddie; the Chad Mitchell Trio, and by Gordon Lightfoot on his debut album Lightfoot! (1966).
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was popularized by Roberta Flack in 1969 in a version that became a breakout hit for the singer. Flack knew the song from the Joe & Eddie version which appeared on that folk duo's 1963 album Coast to Coast (as "The First Time"). Flack's friend singer Donal Leace brought the track to Flack's attention. Having taught the song to the young girls in the glee club at Banneker High School (Washington, D.C.), Flack would regularly perform "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in her set-list at the Pennsylvania Avenue club Mr. Henry's where Flack was hired as resident singer in 1968. In February 1969, Flack would record the song for her debut album First Take. Flack's rendition was much slower-paced than Seeger's original, Flack's take running more than twice the two-and-a-half-minute length of Seeger's.
Flack's slow and sensual version was used by Clint Eastwood in his 1971 directorial film debut: Play Misty for Me to score a love scene featuring Eastwood and actress Donna Mills. Flack would recall how Eastwood, who had heard her version of "The First Time..." on his car radio while driving down the Los Angeles Freeway, phoned out of the blue to Flack's Alexandria (Virginia) home and said "'I'd like to use your song in this movie...about a disc jockey [with] a lot of music in it. I'd use it in the only part of the movie where there's absolute love." Flack agreed to the use of the song. She and Eastwood discussed compensation. Eastwood agreed to pay $2000 and asked Flack if there was anything else. Flack said that she wanted to do it over again because it was too slow. Eastwood disagreed. He used the slow version and the song made history.
Flack's version of "The First Time..." exploded in popularity following the November 1971 release of Play Misty for Me. This persuaded Atlantic Records to issue the track as a single - trimmed by a minute - in February 1972: the track became a smash hit single in the United States, reaching No. 1 for six weeks on both the Billboard Hot 100 and easy listening charts in the spring of 1972, with a No. 4 R&B chart peak. The song also reached No. 14 on the UK Singles Chart, and Flack's "The First Time..." was No. 1 for three weeks on the singles chart in Canada's RPM magazine.
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was played as the wake-up music on flight day 9 to the astronauts aboard Apollo 17 on their last day in Lunar orbit (Friday, December 15, 1972) before returning to Earth, thus ending the last human explorations of the Moon. The use of the song was most likely a reference to the "face" of the Moon below the spacecraft.
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White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) was Eastwood’s most audacious project of this period of his career, an adaptation of Peter Viertel’s roman a clef about his on-location collaboration with director John Huston on The African Queen (1951). Bravely tackling the part of Huston, Eastwood embodied the great director’s rugged physical presence.
Because Eastwood’s style of acting was minimally expressive, his films initially drew little praise from critics. Yet his strong resonant screen presence earned him success at the box office. His standard role was that of a tough loner whose violent tendencies conformed to his own understated moral principles. However, Eastwood’s willingness to demythologize such stock characters as Western heroes and cops eventually brought him critical acclaim, as did his lean, crisp directorial style. He became known as a director equally adept at presenting deep character studies and fluid action sequences.
After the unsuccessful police drama The Rookie (1990), Eastwood's revisionist Western Unforgiven (1992) featured a towering performance by Eastwood as an erstwhile “regulator” who lays down his plowshare to execute a thug who has disfigured a prostitute. Both the picture and Eastwood (for best director) won Academy Awards. The film was critically lauded for Eastwood’s unsentimental look at frontier violence.
In the quiet drama A Perfect World (1993), an escaped convict (Kevin Costner) takes a boy (T.J. Lowther) hostage, and an unlikely bond formed between them. Eastwood played a Texas Ranger tracking them down. He made a rare appearance in another director’s film when he played a United States Secret Service agent trying to thwart a presidential assassination in Wolfgang Petersen’s popular action thriller In the Line of Fire (1993).
The Bridges of Madison County (1995) was Eastwood’s effective mounting of the enormously popular novel by Robert James Waller. Eastwood was excellent as a photographer traveling through Iowa for a magazine piece on its historic covered bridges, and Meryl Streep played a farmer’s wife who, against her better judgment, enters into an affair with him.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) was also based on a book that became a publishing phenomenon, the nonfiction best seller by John Berendt about a murder that rocks the community of Savannah, Georgia, which is populated almost entirely by eccentrics. In the thriller Absolute Power (1997) Eastwood played a thief who, in the midst of a robbery, witnesses the Secret Service murder a woman whom the President of the United States (Gene Hackman) has just attacked sexually. In True Crime (1999) Eastwood starred as a veteran reporter whose investigative skills revive when he learns that a prisoner (Isaiah Washington) scheduled for execution that night is probably innocent.
Space Cowboys (2000) had Eastwood as the head of a team of elderly test pilots (Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland) who have been summoned out of retirement to rescue the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) when an obsolete Russian satellite requires disarming. Blood Work (2002) was a thriller about a retired Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) profiler who is convinced that only he can locate a murderer.
Mystic River (2003) set a new standard for Eastwood as a director. Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins starred as childhood friends who have grown up to live widely disparate lives while still bound to the working-class neighborhood they were born into. Eastwood received another best director Oscar nomination, and the film was also a best picture nominee.
Million Dollar Baby (2004) was another success for Eastwood. A crusty fight trainer (Eastwood) is haunted by his failed relationship with his daughter and a female aspiring boxer (Hilary Swank) who wants to train under him. But tragedy strikes in the midst of her big match, and the rest of the movie is concerned with what makes life worth living. Probably the biggest dark-horse success of Eastwood’s career, Million Dollar Baby won Oscars for best picture, best actress (Swank), and best supporting actor (Morgan Freeman). It also brought Eastwood his second Oscar for best director. The film broke the $100 million mark at the American box office. Eastwood next directed the World War II films Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), both of which focus on the Battle of Iwo Jima. The latter, told from the Japanese perspective, was nominated for several Oscars, including best director and best film.
Changeling (2008) was a period piece set in Los Angeles in 1928. It was based on a grim true story of a missing boy whose mother, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), is horrified when, several months later, the police “return” him to her in the person of an entirely different child. Eastwood won a special award for Changeling at that year’s Cannes film festival. In Gran Torino (2008), Eastwood played Walt Kowalski, an irascible retired autoworker living in a blue-collar suburb of Detroit who is forced to shake off a lifetime of suspicion toward minorities so as to don the role of protector to a family of Hmong immigrants. The film was a major box-office hit.
Shot in Capetown, South Africa, Invictus (2009) took as its subject South African President Nelson Mandela (Freeman) and his plan to unite his racially divided country by using the 1995 Rugby World Cup, in which South Africa’s almost all-white Springboks team, typically reviled by the majority black populace, faced heavily favored New Zealand in the finals. Their inspirational victory was presented in thrilling fashion by Eastwood, but the film’s real strength was its painstaking attention to the political and cultural issues negotiated by the players and Mandela.
Hereafter (2010) was an oddity in the Eastwood canon — a measured, quiet drama about three characters whose widely divergent life experiences have left them convinced of the reality of an afterlife. The anguish experienced by each is etched expertly by Eastwood, but the story is told at a languid pace. J. Edgar (2011) was a weighty biopic of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), the longtime head of the FBI. Armie Hammer had the film’s other key role as Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s right-hand man and the love of Hoover’s life. Thus, J. Edgar was as much a romance as an account of a power-hungry bureaucrat who became one of the most feared—and loathed—figures in American life. Eastwood then helmed a film adaptation (2014) of the Tony Award-winning (2006) musical Jersey Boys, about the rise of the American singing group The Four Seasons.
Eastwood’s adaptation of a Navy SEAL sniper’s memoir, American Sniper (2014), was lauded for the finesse with which it depicted both the violence of the Iraq War and the difficulty of a soldier’s adjustment to civilian existence. The film received an Academy Award nomination for best picture. Eastwood continued to draw inspiration from true-life events with Sully, about airline pilot Chesley ("Sully") Sullenberger (played by Tom Hanks), who landed a malfunctioning commercial jet on the Hudson River. The docudrama recounts both the emergency landing and the ensuing investigation into Sullenberger’s handling of the event.
In his next film, The 15:17 to Paris (2018), Eastwood chronicled the 2015 terrorist attack on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train, and he cast the three Americans who thwarted the strike to play themselves. He also directed and starred in The Mule (2018), a drama based on The New York Times article about a horticulturist and World War II veteran who became a courier for a drug cartel. Eastwood again looked to true events for his next directorial effort, Richard Jewell (2019), a biopic that centers on the Atlanta Olympic Games bombing of 1996 and the security guard who was wrongly suspected of the attack. In 2021, Eastwood directed and starred in Cry Macho, a story of redemption centering on a former rodeo star who agrees to drive a man’s young son home from Mexico.
Besides his Academy Awards, Eastwood received the Irving G. Thalberg Award for lifetime achievement in 1995 and the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1996. In 2007, he was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour and he was elevated to commander two years later.
