May 31
MAKE MY DAY DAY
Men relate to him, women’s hearts skip a beat. He’s the strong, silent type. He’s Clint Eastwood (Jr.), born, probably complete with leathered face, on this day in San Francisco in 1930.
Critics panned the 6'4" tall actor. Most thought he couldn’t deliver a line. He would have agreed with them back in 1954 when he took his first screen test. But instead, he ended up laughing all the way to the bank.
As movies changed, Clint matured with them. He learned his art and became an accomplished, Academy Award-winning director and producer (Unforgiven in 1992). Eastwood actually made his directing debut with the 1971 film, Play Misty for Me. His work ethic, developed when he was just a young boy, helped him finish the movie on time and in budget; a habit he continued as director of High Plains Drifter, The Eiger Sanction, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Bronco Billy among others.
Whether actor, director, producer (made his producer debut in the 1982 film, Firefox), stunt man (does his own stunts), or politician (was the mayor of Carmel, California), Clint Eastwood, as Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, “...absorbed the years and turned them into guts and grit.” Canby was writing about Eastwood’s performance in Heartbreak Ridge, but it could have been a comment on his life’s work.
Whether you picture him as the young cattle driver, Rowdy, in the seven-year-long television series, Rawhide; the silent, man with no name in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly); the fatally attractive DJ in Play Misty for Me; the death-defying rock-hard cop, Dirty Harry; or the sexy, mature photographer who stole the heart of an Iowa farm-wife in The Bridges of Madison County, Clint Eastwood has somewhere, sometime, made your day.
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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