Best Man of Action: Clint Eastwood Interview (page 3 of 5)

The Long Ride

The classic Eastwood character -- detective or desperado, boxing coach or soldier -- is a blend of dependable professional and intractable wanderer. That mix has roots in Eastwood's own life.

During the Depression, his father, a bond broker, traveled California and Washington State pursuing jobs that never seemed to last. Clint attended at least half a dozen schools, and excelled at none of them. (Had he been a kid today, he has said, he might have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.) He wore a leather jacket, tinkered with cars and hung with a tough crowd. Still, he learned to value hard work as a source of pride and self-sufficiency. He bagged groceries and delivered papers, toiled as a logger and steelworker, fought forest fires and dug swimming pools. A jazz fanatic, he taught himself piano and played for pizza and tips at an Oakland bar.

Drafted into the Army during the Korean War, Eastwood did a hitch at Fort Ord, south of San Francisco, where his fellow soldiers suggested that with looks like his, he really ought to try out for the movies. After enrolling at Los Angeles City College, he did. His chiseled cheekbones and six-foot-four frame won him bit parts in Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula and a picture starring Francis the Talking Mule, but soon he was back to spadework. Then in 1959 he landed the part of Rowdy Yates, sidekick to the trail boss, in a new TV western series called Rawhide. He held on to the role for seven years.

Eastwood's ambitious side, though, grew frustrated with the show's constraints. (In private he described his character as "Rowdy Yates, idiot of the plains.") In 1964, during a break in production, he found an escape route: the lead role in a low-budget cowboy movie, filmed in Spain by an iconoclastic Italian named Sergio Leone. Surreal and visually innovative, with minimal dialogue, A Fistful of Dollars featured Eastwood as a mysterious gunman who plays two criminal gangs off each other.

The film became a smash in Europe, and he quickly shot two sequels with Leone. (All three premiered in the United States in 1967.) A new genre was born -- the spaghetti western. The success of the films allowed Eastwood to finally quit his day job.

But he was not about to trade one trap for another. After a few more turns as an actor (Hang 'Em High, Coogan's Bluff), he moved into the director's chair. His debut, 1971's Play Misty for Me, was a radical departure from his earlier films -- the complex story of a womanizing DJ stalked by a psychopathic female fan.

He alternated such experimental work with reliably crowd-pleasing fare, including the comedy Every Which Way But Loose, in which he shared top billing with an orangutan named Clyde.

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