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Profile: Clint Eastwood

Dirty Harry and the Man with No Name are behind him now. At 74, he has reinvented himself as a character actor – and he may yet win an Oscar. Tony Earnshaw reports on the resurrection of Clint Eastwood.

Clint Eastwood has always been something of a schizophrenic star. While the world has gleefully pigeonholed him as a taciturn gun-toting loner in innumerable action thrillers and westerns the man himself has pursued his own agenda in single-minded fashion.

It has been evident for those who cared to look for it. And in the 35 years since ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan first loped onto our cinema screens Eastwood has sought to expand, explore and experiment with his image while never quite denying the public what it wants.

Eastwood will be 75 in May. An old man now, he nevertheless continues to surprise and impress, though even he might raise a lazy eyebrow at the reaction to his latest project Million Dollar Baby, a contemporary drama in which he plays a lonely old boxing coach.

In truth the revelatory exclamations that have greeted Million Dollar Baby are boring to witness: Eastwood has been labouring to re-invent his image for the last 15 years. Turning 60 was, he said, “just another birthday”. It didn’t mean anything. But it coincided with a new direction in Eastwood’s work that saw him preoccupied – some would say obsessed – with the ageing process.

It exploded to the fore in Unforgiven, his bleak, minimalist, revisionist western, in which his impoverished, retired gunslinger is lured back to his guns for one last killing, and almost finds himself swept away by the old evils that surface.

In the Line of Fire the following year continued the theme, though here it was treated with irony as Eastwood’s secret service agent, on the cusp of retirement, puts himself through his paces in the hunt for a would-be assassin.

In fact, practically every film Eastwood has made since 1990 has considered those central themes, and many of them have been critical (and sometimes commercial) failures. Eastwood has striven to surmount his limitations as an actor and has shown his increasing skill as a filmmaker. His choice of subject, however, has occasionally taken him away from audience tastes.

In between shoot-‘em-ups and actioners like The Rookie and Blood Work came the likes of White Hunter, Black Heart and Space Cowboys. Like Sam Peckinpah, who examined minutely the idea of men existing out of their time, Eastwood has tackled character roles, donning the mantle of men who are out of touch with the wider world around them.

It has, then, perhaps been an obsession – the search for meaning when a man becomes an anachronism in a rapidly changing (and unsympathetic) world. And Eastwood has become a master at delivering it.

Like Unforgiven, which landed four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood – he was nominated as Best Actor but did not win – Million Dollar Baby shows Eastwood’s genius for observing character, albeit within his limitations.

The story is based on a series of vignettes, all based around the boxing ring. The redemptive nature is evident from the outset, as Eastwood’s grouchy old trainer is worn down by a go-getting young woman who just wants to be the best boxer she can be.

The big surprise for many film observers is that, at 74, with 50-odd years of macho posturing behind him, Eastwood can believably play a shabby old loser who, heaven forbid, actually sheds tears. This is heartbreaking stuff, and Eastwood puts everything he has learned into the part.

Remember him standing forlornly in the rain in The Bridges of Madison County? Or the mounting frustration of his squinting former angel of death in Unforgiven? Or the dawning horror of the victim at the end of The Beguiled? It’s all here – a superb character study distilled from decades of quiet observation on film sets around the world. It’s light years away from the one-note style that Richard Burton tagged “dynamic lethargy”. Burton meant it as a compliment – it was the type of pared down performing that he found hard to deliver. Eastwood was a master at it. Now, 40 years later, he’s doing what Burton used to do: play a character with elements of himself within it, rather than the other way around.

So, after nearly six decades as jobbing actor, TV stud, European superstar, western hero and, finally, on the back of Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, American icon, Clint Eastwood has emerged as a hypnotic character actor.

When I met him at the end of 2003, Eastwood was riding the success of Mystic River. He professed himself bored with acting, saying “I’m gonna let younger fellas do the acting now” while steering both Sean Penn and Tim Robbins to Oscars, just like he did with Gene Hackman on Unforgiven 11 years before.

When it came to Million Dollar Baby there was only one man for the job: Eastwood himself. To play world-weary Frankie Dunn Eastwood cast aside that dynamic lethargy and opted instead to drag this tired old man from his very soul. At 74, that takes guts.

Then there are the Oscars. Could 2005 be Eastwood’s year? Since 1992 he has never had another chance at Oscar glory for his acting, and Al Pacino took the golden man home on that night. Eastwood was suitably compensated: he took home two. But with a Golden Globe under his belt this week and another for co-star Hilary Swank, the scene is set for a mighty upset in late February. What if bookies’ favourite Jamie Foxx doesn’t get the award for his intimate portrait of Ray Charles? It may well be Eastwood’s night.

And as America wakes up to the concept of Eastwood the actor as opposed to Eastwood the re-actor, there may yet be another face for this most schizophrenic of movie icons.

Only the gods know how good he’ll be when he hits 90.

• This article originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post (Jan 20 2005)