Clint Eastwood

Clinton "Clint" Eastwood (born May 31, 1930) is a renowned American film actor, director, producer and composer. He has received five Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, two Cannes Film Festival awards, and five People's Choice Awards — including one for Favorite All-Time Motion Picture Star.

Eastwood is known for his anti-hero acting roles in violent action and western films. Following his six-year run on the television series Rawhide (1959–65), he starred as the Man With No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s, and as Inspector Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films in the 1970s and 1980s. These roles have made him an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. Eastwood is also notable for his comedic efforts in Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), his two highest-grossing films after adjustment for inflation. For his work in the films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and for producer of the Best Picture, and received nominations for Best Actor. These films in particular, as well as others including Paint Your Wagon (1969), Play Misty for Me (1971), High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Pale Rider (1985), In the Line of Fire (1993), and Gran Torino (2008), have all received great critical acclaim and commercial success. He has directed most of his star vehicles as well as films he has not acted in, such as Mystic River (2003) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), for which he received Academy Award nominations.

He also served as the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California from 1986–1988, tending to support small business interests as well as environmental protection.

Eastwood was born in San Francisco in a family of steelworker and a factory workers. He was a large baby (11 pounds and 6 ounces; 5.62 kg) and was named "Samson" by the nurses in the hospital. Eastwood is of English, Scottish, Dutch, and Irish ancestry, and was raised in a "middle class Protestant home". His family relocated often, as his father worked at different jobs along the West Coast, including at a pulp mill. The family settled in Piedmont, California, where Eastwood attended Piedmont Junior High School and Piedmont Senior High School. Later he transferred to Oakland Technical High School, where the drama teachers encouraged him to enroll in school plays, but he was not interested. He held a series of jobs as his family moved to different areas, including paper carrier, grocery clerk, forest firefighter, and golf caddy.

After graduating from high school in 1949, Eastwood intended to enter Seattle University and major in music theory. However, in 1950 he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He was stationed at Fort Ord, where his certificate as a lifeguard got him appointed as a life-saving and swimming instructor. He safeguarded film and television actors who had joined the Army through the Special Services program, including John Saxon, David Janssen, and Martin Milner. In 1951, while on leave, Eastwood rode in a Douglas AD bomber that ran out of fuel and crashed in the ocean near Point Reyes. After escaping from the sinking fuselage, he and the pilot swam 3 miles (5 km) to the shore.

He later moved to Los Angeles and began a romance with Maggie Johnson, a college student. During this time he managed an apartment house in Beverly Hills by day (into which he moved) and worked at a Signal Oil gas station by night. He enrolled at Los Angeles City College and soon after became engaged to Maggie. They were married shortly before Christmas in 1953 in South Pasadena and honeymooned in Carmel.

He received his Doctor of Humane Letters Degree from University of Southern California in May of 2007.

According to the CBS press release for Rawhide, Universal (known then as Universal-International) film company happened to be shooting in Fort Ord and an enterprising assistant spotted Eastwood and invited him to meet the director. However, the key figure, according to his official biography, was a man named Chuck Hill, who was stationed in Fort Ord and had contacts in Hollywood. While in Los Angeles, Hill had become reacquainted with Eastwood and managed to sneak Eastwood into a Universal studio, where he showed him to cameraman Irving Glassberg. Glassberg was impressed with Eastwood's appearance and stature and believed him to be "the sort of good looking young man that has traditionally done well in the movies".

In May 1954, Eastwood made his first real audition, trying out for a part in Six Bridges to Cross.

Since then Clint Eastwood has appeared in over 55 films, including Hang 'Em High, Escape from Alcatraz, The Bridges of Madison County, and Gran Torino. Eastwood started directing in 1971, and in 1982, his debut as a producer began with two films, Firefox and Honkytonk Man. Eastwood also has contributed music to his films, either through performing, writing, or composing. He has mainly starred in western, action, comedy, and drama films.