Clinton Eastwood, Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an Academy Award-winning American film director, actor, producer, and composer. He has won Academy Awards five times - twice each as Best Director and as producer of the Best Picture; he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1995.


Eastwood was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Margaret Ruth (née Runner), a factory worker, and Clinton Eastwood, Sr., a steelworker and migratory worker.Eastwood has Scottish, English, Dutch and Irish ancestry.He was raised in a "middle class Protestant home" and moved often as a child as his father worked a variety of jobs along the West Coast. The family settled in Piedmont, California during his teens, and he graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1949. After high school Eastwood worked as a gas station attendant, a firefighter, and played ragtime piano at a bar in Oakland. He was drafted in 1950 but his plane crashed in the Pacific north of San Francisco. He escaped serious injury, but had to remain behind to testify at a hearing investigating the cause of the crash. This prevented him from being shipped to Korea like some of his unit.


In 1982 Eastwood directed, produced, and starred in Fire fox which thrived off the USSR Vs USA Cold War. The fourth Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact (1983) made Eastwood a viable star for the 1980s.[citation needed] President Ronald Reagan referenced his famous "Go ahead, make my day" line in one of his speeches. In Tightrope (1984) Eastwood starred as Capt. Wes Block set in New Orleans.

Eastwood revisited the western genre directing and starring in Pale Rider (1985), a homage to the western film classic Shane, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. His fifth and final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool (1988), was a success overall, but it lacked the box office punch his previous films had achieved. Eastwood alternated between more mainstream comedic films (if not particularly successful), such as Pink Cadillac and The Rookie (1990), and more personal projects, such as directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie "Bird" Parker which gave him the nomination for the Golden Palm in the Cannes Film Festival. He also directed and starred, as an ersatz John Huston, in White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), an uneven adaptation of Peter Viertel's roman à clef about the making of the classic The African Queen. The film received some critical acclaim, although Katharine Hepburn contested the veracity of much of the material.

Eastwood began work as an actor, making brief appearances in B-films such as Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula and Francis in the Navy. In 1958, he got his first starring role in a feature film, Ambush at Cimarron Pass, which he has dismissed as "probably the lousiest Western ever made."[citation needed] In 1959, he fistfought James Garner in the "Duel at Sundown" episode of Maverick. Eastwood then got a huge break when he was cast as the second lead in the long-running television series, Rawhide. As Rowdy Yates (whom Eastwood described as "the idiot of the plains" in private[8]), he became a household name across the country.

Eastwood has his own Warner Bros. Records-distributed imprint, Malpaso Records, as part of his deal with Warner Bros. This deal was unchanged when Warner Music Group was sold by Time Warner to private investors. Malpaso has released all of the scores of Eastwood's films from The Bridges of Madison County onward. It also released the album of a 1996 jazz concert he hosted, titled Eastwood after Hours — Live at Carnegie Hall.

Eastwood, who has been married twice, has five daughters and two sons by five different women: Kimber (born 1964), with Roxanne Tunis; Kyle (born in 1968) and Alison (born on May 22, 1972), with ex-wife Maggie Johnson; Scott (born March 21, 1986) and Kathryn (born February 2, 1988), with airline hostess Jacelyn Reeves; Francesca Ruth (born August 7, 1993), with Frances Fisher, his co-star in Unforgiven; and Morgan (born December 12, 1996), with current wife Dina Ruiz. He lived with actress Sondra Locke from 1976 to 1988. The relationship produced no children.