The good, bad and ugly of Clint Eastwood — a revealing biography

Stetsons off to Shawn Levy, whose book Clint: The Man and the Movies brings the celebrated actor and director’s life and career bang up to date

The Sunday Times

By Anne Billson

September 12, 2025

The year before my father died we went to see Bird, the 1988 film directed by Clint Eastwood. My dad, a lifelong jazz fanatic, was sceptical that Eastwood, an actor best known for playing the violent antiheroes of A Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry, could pull off this biopic of the pioneering saxophonist Charlie Parker. But what he didn’t realise was that Eastwood was a lifelong jazz fanatic too. My dad was won over by the director’s choices and came out of Bird impressed and moved.

It was with a similar degree of scepticism that I approached Shawn Levy’s Clint: The Man and the Movies. There have already been hundreds of books written about Eastwood. In his introduction Levy cites two in particular: Richard Schickel’s Clint Eastwood: A Biography (1996), which he deems overly generous towards its subject, and Patrick McGilligan’s Clint: The Life and Legend (1999), which he deems overly harsh. But Eastwood has directed 19 films this century alone, and Levy steers a fair course between hagiography and demolition job in bringing the star’s life and career bang up to date.

Eastwood was born in San Francisco in 1930. His father shielded his family from the worst of the Great Depression by repeatedly uprooting and relocating to where there was work. “I must have gone to ten different schools in ten years,” Eastwood recalls. He loved animals, taught himself to play the piano and developed a passion for jazz, hanging out at Oakland clubs where he saw Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Parker, among others.

Tall for his age and a bit of a loner, Eastwood worked as a logger, firefighter and grocery clerk. He was drafted, but spared live combat during the Korean War when the army decided he would be more useful to them as a lifeguard. Around this time he discovered Carmel-by-the-Sea, south of San Francisco. It’s not far from Los Angeles, but — as he found when he chose it as the location for Play Misty for Me (1971), his directing debut — far enough away to avoid studio interference, enabling him to be of Hollywood but at the same time outside it. Eventually, in the 1980s, he served a two-year term as the city’s mayor.

It seemed natural for a tall, good-looking Californian to try his hand at acting, but success was slow in coming. In 1959, after years of auditions and walk-on parts, he was cast as Rowdy Yates, one of the leads of the TV western series Rawhide. Making a living as an actor at last seemed feasible, but the breakthrough didn’t come until he was 34, when the Italian director Sergio Leone cast him in A Fistful of Dollars, a low-budget western being shot in southern Spain. The Man with No Name, with his black cigarillos and scruffy poncho, cemented Clint’s minimalist acting style (a casting director had once advised him, “Don’t just do something — stand there!”) and he learnt to pare away his dialogue (“It’s difficult to play strength on screen if you rattle on”). The film was a risk, but at least if it flopped, no one in America would see it.

But A Fistful of Dollars was a hit in Italy and made Eastwood a star in Europe while American critics were still sneering at “spaghetti westerns”. Eastwood, who would go on to make two more westerns with Leone, told his co-star Eli Wallach during the filming of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: “I’m going back to California, and I’ll form my own production company, and I’ll act and direct my own movies.” And so he did, co-founding Malpaso Productions in 1967, giving himself unprecedented control over the films he acted in and directed.

He later dedicated his Oscar-winning western, Unforgiven (1992), to Leone and his other mentor, Don Siegel. Siegel directed Eastwood in five films, including his second signature role, in Dirty Harry, and the director’s no-nonsense approach to film-making influenced Eastwood’s own. “I’ve just seen a lot of waste in this business,” Eastwood said. “I just thought that with [Malpaso] there could be some kind of alternative.” His films would always come in on schedule and under budget, and he became notorious for his speedy (sometimes sloppy) shooting style. When Meryl Streep saw herself in The Bridges of Madison County (directed and co-starring Eastwood, and so much better than the bestselling book on which it was based) she said to him: “You know what I love? You used all my mistakes.”

[As Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry (1971)]

There’s no new material here, and Levy doesn’t appear to have interviewed the man himself, but his rigorous and methodical triage of the available information builds into a thrilling record of a monumental career spanning seven decades, and presents an overdue appreciation of its subject’s achievement in forging a path from TV star to icon. It’s also a useful reminder of an astonishing work ethic, seemingly inherited from his father; making up to three films a year while simultaneously preparing future projects.

Levy doesn’t shy away from the man’s less admirable qualities, professing himself “grateful that I never worked for him or was a woman in his life”. Eastwood has fathered at least eight children with six different women, and his two marriages have overlapped with serial liaisons both long-term and casual. And there was casual psychological cruelty too, when the spell of a relationship was wearing off. His treatment of Sondra Locke, his companion and co-star from 1975 to 1989, sounds particularly despicable.

[With his first wife, Maggie Johnson, in 1956]

 This is ironic considering so much of Eastwood’s work, particularly in the latter part of his career, has featured unusually multidimensional roles for women. Moreover, as an actor he has repeatedly undercut his macho persona in films such as Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971), a gothic Civil War western in which his wounded soldier is unmanned by a seminary full of women, or Tightrope (1984), in which his New Orleans cop finds he has more in common with the misogynistic killer he’s hunting than he cares to admit. Critics often decried the violence of the roles that made him famous, but Eastwood critiqued the bloodshed and cruelty of this early work by examining “the cost of killing on the soul of the perpetrator” in later films such as Unforgiven (1992), Mystic River (2003) and Flags of Our Fathers (2006).

Last year, at the age of 94, he directed his 40th film, the courtroom thriller Juror #2. And it was good. There was outrage at the way the bean-counting suits at Warner Bros, the distributors, repaid a film-maker who had given them half a century of profitability and innumerable awards by trying to wriggle out of giving it a proper theatrical release, claiming it was substandard. On the contrary, Juror #2 was pretty damn good, and received critical praise — and there are rumours it might not even be Eastwood’s last hurrah.

[With the actor Nicholas Hoult on the set of Juror #2]

Not all the films are masterpieces, and there have been missteps (including that weird business with the empty chair, representing Barack Obama, at the 2012 Republican Convention). But there is also confirmation here that the best of Eastwood’s work, on both sides of the camera, offers a reflection on and critical examination of the American soul. “I believe he’s an indelible screen icon,” Levy writes, “an occasionally great director, and an emblematic citizen of Hollywood, Carmel and the United States.”