If you ask anybody who knows a damn about cinema
who the manliest manin Hollywood is, there’s only one answer you’ll get. He
reinvented the cowboy and practically trademarked the steely-eyed gaze. The
Man With No Name has a name, and even that is manly: Clint Eastwood.
Clinton Eastwood was born in San Francisco on May 31, 1930. In highschool,
despite encouragement from his teachers, he was uninterested in drama and
instead played a number of sports. He was drafted into the army during the
Korean War, although he never served overseas. While aboard a bomber the
plane crashed into the ocean, and
Clint
had to swim three miles in to
shore. Shortly thereafter, he leftmilitary service, moved to LA and got
married.
Early in his film career,
Clint struggled with management and what
directors called his “amateurish” acting characteristics. Ironically,many of
these traits, like his stiff manner and habit of hissing hislines, would
later become oft-imitated trademarks of his acting style.
Clint's big career breakthrough came in 1958, when he was signed to star
in CBS’s Western television show Rawhide. Working on the show was tough for
Clint but it launched his career and his image – the ultimate man of the
frontier. When a co-star of Rawhide turned down an opportunity to star in a
film by then-unknown Italian director Sergio Leone, Clint took the part
that would earn him immortality – The Man With No Name, anonymous star of
Leone’s now-legendary Dollars
Trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the
Bad and the Ugly. These three Spaghetti Westerns introduced Western
audiences to the true antihero – a lawless, morally ambiguous character with
a mysterious past whose actions, while not necessarily wrong, certainly tend
to be self-serving. It was a new concept for Hollywood – and one that
cemented Eastwood’s place in cinematic
history.
Clint's career continued to grow onscreen, including his most famous
role: the titular Dirty Harry
(1971), which is largely credited with creating the
“loose cannon” genre of cop stories. However, Clint also began to direct,
starting with 1971’s Play Misty for Me, in whichhe also starred as a radio
DJ fending off the psychotic advances of a rabid fan.
To this day,
Clint
continues to star, direct and be all that is man in Hollywood. As the
originator of some of cinema’s most memorable characters, dialogue and even
archetypes, few men have left as big a mark on film as Clint Eastwood. To
celebrate the manliest man ever to grace the silver screen, just man up and
throw back a few Dirty Harry Cocktails while watching
Clint in
Dirty Harry .