Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood spent six years on Rawhide, from 1959 to 1965, which in television terms is a long stretch to be the second lead on a cattle drive. The escape route was Italy. Sergio Leone cast him in A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, then For a Few Dollars More in 1965 and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966. The films were cheap, dubbed and largely dismissed at the time, and between them they built a screen persona that has needed no adjustment since.

1971 is the year worth marking twice. Dirty Harry gave him Harry Callahan, a character argued about then and argued about now, and the film produced four sequels running through to 1988. In the same year he directed Play Misty for Me, a modest thriller nobody was obliged to take seriously. He has since directed something close to forty features. The acting made him famous roughly a decade before the directing made him respectable, and he was plainly working on both at once.

Through the seventies and eighties the westerns and the cop pictures kept coming - The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976, Escape from Alcatraz in 1979, Pale Rider in 1985 - and he stayed commercially reliable in a way that critics found faintly irritating. He also served as mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea from 1986 to 1988, which was widely treated as a joke and was not one. Then Unforgiven in 1992 took Best Picture and Best Director, with a Best Actor nomination alongside.

The then-and-now comparison for Eastwood is not really about a face, though the face has aged into exactly what the early films were pretending it already was. It is about an unusually long second act. The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award came in 1995, Mystic River in 2003, then Million Dollar Baby in 2004 and a second Best Director and Best Picture. American Sniper followed in 2014. He directed Juror No. 2 in 2024, aged ninety-four.