Clint Eastwood, American rebel

Hollywood stars, so tall on screen, tend to be pretty small in real life. Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman are 5ft 5in (1.65m), Tom Cruise is 5ft 7in (1.7m), Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix 5ft 8in (1.73m), and Paul Newman was 5ft 9in (1.75m).

But Clint Eastwood is different. At 6ft 4in (1.93m), Clint Eastwood is the real thing.

Oddly enough, as a struggling actor in the early fifties, Eastwood was sacked by the Universal Talent School for not being handsome enough. They said his teeth were too small and his Adam's apple was too big. Burt Reynolds was sacked from the same school on the same day, but for a different reason. They had no complaints about his looks, but thought he couldn't act.

"Don't worry," Burt said ungraciously to Eastwood as they walked out through the car park together, "I may learn to act some day but you'll never get rid of that Adam's apple." As things turned out, only one of these predictions came to pass: Eastwood never got rid of his Adam's apple. But it doesn't seem to have harmed his career. He has been more successful, over a longer period of time, than any other American actor, and now, coming up to his 80th birthday, he remains unfeasibly charismatic.

I am no movie buff, but reading Clint Eastwood: American rebel by Marc Eliot, I was surprised how many of his films I have both seen and enjoyed. They stretch from my favourite, Dirty Harry, through the slightly obscure The Beguiled, one of only three movies he dies in, to the most recent, Gran Torino, in which he plays a version of the same character he has always played: detached, deadpan, simmering, enigmatic, vengeful, cool.

I have even quite enjoyed the films Eastwood has made that would have been awful with any other actor: Absolute Power, The Bridges Of Madison County and half of the Harry Callahan films among them. And then there are all the films he has directed, particularly those in the past few years - Changeling, Mystic River, Flags Of Our Fathers - which show greater thoughtfulness, but with no loss of narrative drive.

I was worried that Eliot's biography might seek to drive a wedge between his on-screen image and the real Clint Eastwood. Might he secretly like to mime to Barbra Streisand records while arranging flowers? Does Dirty Harry leap for cover whenever a car backfires? Is he scared stiff of spiders? Does he fly into hissy fits if someone starts calling him names?

Image

I'm happy to say that, by and large, Eastwood lives up to his image. The only slightly namby-pamby thing he does is to fuss with vast amounts of health potions and vitamin pills, but then the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and he looks a good 20 years younger than he is.

In one respect, he is much more macho than his persona. On screen, he is rarely sidetracked by women: he has too many evil ranchers or serial killers to deal with. But the real Clint Eastwood - somewhat to the disapproval of his priggish biographer - has had lovers galore, among them Catherine Deneuve and Jean Seberg.

He has had seven children by four different women, only one of whom was his wife.

"Clint's off-screen life has always been filled with women, some might say too many, others might say none really at all," sniffs his biographer, who sounds a tad jealous to me. "Several of them were co-stars, in affairs that often began when production on the film commenced and ended after the final shot was completed."

But the woman he married in 1953, and only divorced in 1984, is still a regular at his parties, which suggests he can't be all bad.

The only woman he ever really came to blows with is the grabby actress Sondra Locke, who, from the sound of it, is almost as annoying as her Christian name.

In his single-mindedness, Eastwood is strikingly similar to the characters he plays. While other directors faff around - Kubrick took 12 years to make the stultifyingly laborious Eyes Wide Shut - Eastwood whips his films along, and is generally content with the first take. He likes to finish filming in the morning, allowing time for golf in the afternoon.

"I think the most takes I ever did on Clint's movie was three, and that was rare," recalls Sean Penn. The result was Mystic River, which was stamped through with Eastwood's extraordinary sense of drive and purpose. One of his most panoramic films, Unforgiven, was all done and dusted within a month.

His sense of detachment is also a common factor. His characters exist at a distance from the dramas that surround them. This sense of being at one remove from events allows him to be both a director and an actor at the same time.

"The reason he can direct himself and a film and take himself outside of it and put himself inside is I think he views himself at a distance," says Meryl Streep, who co-starred with him, and was directed by him, in The Bridges Of Madison County.

And he is not one to take no for an answer. In real life, he might not walk into a one-horse town and take on the council with a .44 Magnum, but he certainly does the next best thing. As a long-time resident of the (disappointingly touristy) one-horse and 200 gift shops town of Carmel in California, Eastwood hated a new bylaw that prevented him eating ice cream in the street, so he took on the town council by standing for mayor.

The moment he was elected, he lifted the ice-cream ban and fired the heads of the four planning commissions that had turned down one of his building proposals.

He then set about his planned improvements: a new library, more public toilets and better pedestrian access to the beach. It might not be quite as exciting as shooting 20 baddies in under two minutes, but you can't have everything.

The only election promise he failed to keep was to be "a lot less active in films". The rest of us are the beneficiaries of this white lie: he managed to knock off another two movies during his brief stint as mayor. - Mail on Sunday

- Eastwood's latest offering, Invictus, about South Africa's 1995 Rugby World Cup win, opened in Durban last week to favourable reviews.