Читать книгу Clint Eastwood - The Biography of Cinema's Greatest Ever Star - Douglas Thompson - Страница 4

There are scores of people to thank for their help over a disquieting number of years and most of them appear in what follows. Those who don’t include the late and much-missed James Ravenscroft at John Blake Publishing. Also, the company’s Steve Burdett who controlled this paperback edition and also believed in a truly popular 21st-century biography of Clint Eastwood.

I first encountered Clint in 1974. He was a gentleman then and has been ever since, on movie sets, at Hollywood studios, at grand events and in his home town of Carmel, California, which has always been his anchor, his antidote to the worldwide acclaim he has achieved in a unique movie-making career. He’s always been generous with his time.

As have a myriad of his co-stars and film-making collaborators, friends, family and lovers. Richard Burton told me Clint was the easiest actor – ‘no histrionics whatever’ – he ever worked with. He came up with his now famous phrase to describe his Where Eagles Dare co-star: Clint, he said, had ‘dynamic lethargy’. No one, then or now, had a clue what he meant other than it was intended as a generous compliment. Charlie Bronson, who got hauled into a Dirty Harry versus Death Wish movies war and had appeared in his early days in Rawhide, offered: ‘Clint’s all class so there’s no conflict.’ Richard Harris rattled on that he had one of the great experiences of his life co-starring in Unforgiven. Among a host of others, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are fans and Oscar beneficiaries of their friend’s work.

A Civil Rights supporter and activist actor, Robbins said of his first meeting: ‘Clint is not really a Republican, he’s a libertarian. I thought I was going to meet “Dirty Harry” but he’s a sweet, gentle, decent person. Look at his crew: there are people that have been with him for years and years. He’s a loyal, honourable man. That’s what’s important for all of us.’

Meryl Streep was more intimate: ‘I love him.’

Which is something echoed by Hilary Swank from Million Dollar Baby, Rene Russo from In the Line of Fire, Wanda De Jesus and Anjelica Huston from Blood Work and Marcia Gay Harden from Mystic River. Eastwood has always brought women into his films for a reason, not as decoration.

He is a family man in a grand, jigsaw-puzzle sense: he has seven children by five different women; in 2007 the eldest, Kimber, was forty-three and the youngest, Morgan, eleven. Almost all are open and easy to talk with. Clint is patriarch of an unusual but usually very happy family.

Eastwood is not a superstar corporation but a sharp, individual businessman who knows the balance of box office and integrity, professionalism and privacy and, most of all, understands loyalty. He’s been that way since his 1950s television series Rawhide. He has worked with the same people for decades, and explains: ‘They know the shorthand.’

They also all know Clint. And that is so welcome when you want to discover the inside story of a living legend …

To all, salutations.