who is clints hero?

[ajay]

this needs an answer as to who is clints favoutite actor, i am not sure whether this has been asked or discussed, can somebody comment on this. i dont mind some info on his fav... actress.

[KC]

Before Pat McGilligan became a muckraking biographer  , he was a pretty good film journalist. I think I would have included his 1976 interview (published in Focus on Film, no. 25) in Clint Eastwood: Interviews, even if I'd known what McGilligan was going to stoop to a quarter of a century later. Here's what Clint had to say, back then, about his favorite actor (McGilligan was trying to get him to say what attracted him to the Western genre):

Did you, for example, like John Wayne when you were young?

I liked him as a youth, depending on the film, but I was never a fan of any one particular actor outside of James Cagney.

That surprises me.

I’ve only met him once.

Robert Redford told me the same thing: the only actor he admires is James Cagney.

I love him. I love his early films, I always try to watch them on television.

That’s funny. In a sense, he’s the opposite kind of actor from you—he’s convulsive and you’re so restrained.

He isn’t at all like me. When I first started out as an actor, all the secretaries used to call me Coop, because they thought I resembled Gary Cooper, kind of a backward kid—quite a few years ago.

But Cagney … I always liked Cagney’s style and energy. He was fearless. Most of those guys were, though: they were fearless. Going back to the most famous thing, sticking grapefruits in people’s faces, they weren’t afraid to do things that were outrageous. A lot of actors get wrapped up in images.

(As reprinted in Clint Eastwood: Interviews, p. 27-28.)

[ajay]

surprise! i read somewhere that he admired james stewart.

[KC]

I meant to post again in this thread, ajay ... elsewhere, Eastwood has indeed expressed his admiration for Stewart. He told Richard Schickel (Clint Eastwood, p. 13):

"I've always felt there has to be something burning inside you. I've always felt that an actor has to be in touch with his own anger about something." All the actors he admires, who in some sense formed him, share this quality, beginning with his favorite, James Cagney, and including, among others, John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum ...

It is a surprising list, in that it is weighted toward urban types and excludes the great western figures, the ones Clint has most often been compared to ... Only James Stewart, who did some of his best work in westerns, but came to them relatively late in his career ... is mentioned ... in this context: "I think he was more in touch with his anger than any actor of his generation."