Books

Shawn Levy
Clint

McGilligan’s 1999, warts’n’all Clint: The Life and Legend. The now 95-year-old actor-director officially authorised the former and sued the latter. Writing biographies of the living can be a risky business.

Levy’s tone in Clint: The Man and the Movies is generally respectful, but he doesn’t pull his punches as he follows Eastwood’s journey from sidekick in the television series Rawhide to star to the guy calling the shots as the director of 40 features. The figure who emerges from his book has much in common with the characters Eastwood played in Sergio Leone’s so-called Man With No Name trilogy and the five Dirty Harry films: a no-nonsense hombre who goes his own way according to his own rules, doesn’t take kindly to those who stand in his way and often responds ruthlessly to perceived slights. In other words, a not particularly likeable human being who gets the job done.

Levy proposes that 1973’s High Plains Drifter offers a neat metaphor for Eastwood’s career arc, “a dude whom nobody reckons on coming in, taking over, and running things as he sees fit”. Initially he wasn’t taken seriously as an actor, but with some sage advice from anti-method acting instructor Jack Kosslyn – “Don’t just do something, stand there” – and the savvy guidance of Leone and Don Siegel, the tide turned.

An insightful commentator, Levy probes Eastwood’s increasing maturity both on-screen and behind the camera. Noting how he went from a non-actor to one “with naturalistic authority and ease”, he examines how his subject’s later films “explicitly critiqued the bloodshed and cruelty so evident in his earliest work”, also identifying how “the theme of a fallen man finding salvation in his profession has always been one of Clint’s most obsessively scratched itches”.

At the same time, he calls Eastwood to account for his often horrible treatment of women, in particular Sondra Locke, who famously and successfully sued him. The father of eight children with six different mothers over 42 years, “as far as he knows”, Levy’s Clint is a man whose careless dismissal of sexual partners mirrors his treatment of professional collaborators who outlived their usefulness.

While it pays credit where it’s due, Levy’s biography ensures that we understand why the name Eastwood gave to his production company – Malpaso, named after the nearby Malpaso Creek but Spanish for “misstep” – might be entirely appropriate.

HarperCollins, 560pp, $59.99 (hardback)

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as "Clint".

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