(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
He may have only been in his 20s when he landed his breakthrough role on-screen, but Clint Eastwood wasn’t always convinced that his future lay solely in acting.
The star was on the cusp of turning 30 when Rawhide first aired in 1959, but his filmography was hardly bare at that point. However, he’d been restricted almost entirely to uncredited parts in feature films and one-episode guest spots on television before being cast as Rowdy Yates, which lit the touchpaper on an ascent that would eventually see him go down in history as one of American cinema’s greatest icons.
Before that, though, Eastwood had worked a number of odd jobs that included bagging groceries, delivering newspapers, caddying at golf courses, and serving as a lifeguard. Stardom was hardly at the forefront of his mind during that period, especially when one of his earliest trips to the cinema left him convinced that working in Hollywood was nigh-on unattainable as a realistic goal.
As he explained to Michael Parkinson, catching the biggest movie of the year with his father first opened his eyes to what cinema really was. “One of the first films I went to – I went with my dad because my mother didn’t want to go and see a war movie – was Sergeant York,” he said. His father was already enthralled by World War I hero Alvin C. York, but for the young Eastwood, it had a much bigger impact.
“That was when I first became aware of movies, who made them, who was involved,” he continued, but it hadn’t quite sparked his imagination and convinced him that was where fame and fortune lay. At the time, he thought pursuing it as a career “just seemed to be way out of anybody’s reach,” with his interpretation of the movies being their entertainment value, “and you didn’t dissect them much further than that.”
Co-written by John Huston and directed by the legendary Howard Hawks, Sergeant York was the highest-grossing release of the year and an awards season heavy-hitter to boot. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards including, ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, the biographical wartime drama saw Gary Cooper take home the prize for ‘Best Actor’, while it also won for ‘Best Editing’.
Eastwood would have only recently turned 11 years old when Sergeant York first hit the big screen, and it would be almost a decade and a half before he made his screen debut in the uncredited part of a lab technician called Jennings in 1955’s 3D-enhanced monster movie Revenge of the Creature, but it nonetheless opened his eyes to the names, faces, and processes involved in bringing a film to the screen.
Of course, that’s something he’d become more familiar with than most given his remarkable longevity, and it’s an added bonus that the life-altering experience came from watching a stone-cold classic.
