Acting work came for Clint Eastwood after spell in the army, signing his contract with Universal Studios in 1954. On the whole, his time at Universal is probably best left forgotten. His output being limited to bit parts in such trashy films as Revenge of the Creature and Tarantula. It was not long before he had been dropped by the studio and went on to find his own work, small parts for TV and films, in between digging Swimming Pools as a day job.

Eastwood's big break came with the TV series Rawhide, where he was cast as cattle driver Rowdy Yates. In turn, this led to his being lured to Spain to star in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Eastwood gained an international reputation, at the same time developing the screen image which was to see him through his career.

1971 saw his debut as director with Play Misty for Me, the same year in which he first took on the lead role of Dirty Harry in the film of the same name. The seventies saw Eastwood as Hollywoods most bankable star with films such as High Plains Drifter. In 1980 the New York Museum of Modern Art featured his career in a retrospective exhibition, boosting his already stellar status. Hit films continued in the first half of the 1980's before he took up the post of Mayor, to which the citizens of Carmel, California had elected him.

His term of office lasted from 1986 to 1988, returning to the screen with The Dead Pool, the fifth Dirty Harry movie. He went on to direct Bird, a biography of Charlie Parker which met with critical acclaim. The Unforgiven, his thought provoking 1992 western, in which he featured alongside Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman, earned him both best picture and best director oscars. Further success came as a secret service agent with 1993's In the Line of Fire and as romantic lead in 1995's The Bridges of Madison county.

His producing, directing and acting shows little sign of letting up, doing all three for Absolute Power (1997) and the two former in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. As well as recent TV work, he made an uncredited appearance in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998), took the lead role in True Crime (1999) and blasted off with his elderly chums in Space Cowboys (2000) - taking the director's as well as the pilot's seat.