Clint Eastwood
Born: May 31, 1930
Where: San Francisco, California
The celebrated actor made a seamless transition to Oscar-winning director and has consistently stayed ahead of the Hollywood game.
Career highlights include Unforgiven - for which he landed an Oscar for best director - and the dark thriller Mystic River, as well as his most recent triumph, Million Dollar Baby, for which he won the Best Director Oscar.
The film, a dark and emotional journey into the world of female boxing, took Best Picture at the 77th Academy Awards, and its co-stars Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman also walked away with gold statuettes.
Legend
As a legend in front of the camera, he enthralled audiences as "the man with no name" in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and brutal cop Harry Callaghan in the Dirty Harry series.
However, he started his working life as a lumberjack, forest fire-fighter and a steelworker.
Growing up in Depression-era California, where his parents were manual labourers, he had to fight to work his way out of his impoverished background.
Diggin swimming pools
His film acting debut came in 1955 in Revenge of the Creature - but he had to support himself during filming by digging swimming pools in Beverley Hills.
Subsequent uncredited big screen roles cast him as "first Saxon", ranch hand and "dumbo pilot".
In 1959, he was cast as the cowboy Rowdy Yates in the TV series Rawhide before director Sergio Leone cast him as the mysterious drifter in A Fistful of Dollars.
The third of the sequels - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - established him as an A-list star and upped his profile.
(during the entire series of spaghetti westerns, Eastwood would wear the same - unwashed - poncho).
Similar Western roles would follow before Eastwood starred alongside Richard Burton in the highly-praised World War II thriller Where Eagles Dare.
In 1970, Eastwood starred in Two Mules for Sister Sara before playing the taciturn Kelly in the World War II gold heist romp Kelly's Heroes with Telly Savalas.
Critically-acclaimed directorial debut
The following year he made his critically-acclaimed directorial debut with Play Misty for Me, in which he also starred.
However, it was his role as the steel-eyed police inspector in 1971's Dirty Harry (1971) that gave Eastwood one of his signature roles after Frank Sinatra turned it down.
Eastwood still found work in spaghetti westerns like High Plains Drifter, Joe Kidd and Hang 'Em High.
Other outings included Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force and climbing drama The Eiger Sanction.
The Enforcer was regarded as the best Dirty Harry sequel while 1976's The Outlaw Josey Wales considered to perhaps be one of the quintessential westerns.
It was also his first film with partner Sandra Locke.
As the late seventies approached, Eastwood found more solid work in comedies like Every Which Way But Loose and thrillers like Escape from Alcatraz.
Lost the edge
However, he appeared to have lost his edge with a slew of unremarkable films including Honkytonk Man and Firefox.
The fourth sequel to Dirty Harry - Sudden Impact - recouped some success and he went on to make solid if unsensational movies with Tightrope and City Heat and the final Dirty Harry outing The Dead Pool.
His profile took a nosedive with the likes of The Rookie and Pink Cadillac and he turned to more personal projects such as Charlie Parker biopic Bird and John Huston biography White Hunter, Black Heart.
At the same time his interest in politics was growing and in 1986 he won a landslide victory as mayor of Carmel in California.
In 1992 he produced an ace from his sleeve with the magnificent Western Unforgiven, in which he starred and also directed.
He impressed as an ageing CIA agent in In The Line of Fire and worked well with Kevin Costner in the drama A Perfect World.
The Bridges of Madison County with Meryl Streep showed he could handle a delicate love story but he subsquently hit a fallow period with True Crime.
Space Cowboy!
Space Cowboys - teaming him up with Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland - was a respectable comedy while Blood Work proved a routine thriller.
However, Eastwood then confounded the critics with the accomplished thriller Mystic River which landed Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.
On a career high, Eastwood managed to top that with the powerful Million Dollar Baby.
