(born 1930) Actor and director who has come to embody the lank, brooding, taciturn loner in the old West and contemporary police drama. Eastwood’s career began with the longrunning television western Rawhide (CBS, 1959–65), but took off after his 1960s trilogy of “Spaghetti westerns” with Sergio Leone (e.g. A Fistful of Dollars, 1964). In the 1970s, he alternated this cowboy persona with that of an edgy violent policeman in Dirty Harry (1971), whose tag line “Make my Day” was even taken up by President Reagan.

Eastwood has subsequently established himself as a more serious actor and director, gaining dual Oscar Awards for his reinterpretation of the western in Unforgiven (1992).

Off-screen, he has served as mayor of Carmel, California and has been the subject of a famous “palimony” suit.