Clint Eastwood turns 86! The first time he spoke lines to a camera, he blew them.Bio from http://www.clinteastwood.net/biography/index3.php
A couple of pictures later he spoke his lines perfectly, but he was buried so deep in a dark scene that he couldn't be seen. Toward the end of his first year as an actor, he had a nice little scene with a major star on a major production, and he found a good-looking pair of glasses that he thought gave him a bit of character. But Rock Hudson thought the same thing when he saw the kid wearing them, and Clint had to surrender his specs to the leading man. "I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn't," Clint Eastwood once said. "But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was."Clint Eastwood became a star in westerns, but he became a superstar playing cops. One can even identify the exact moment when it happened. It is early in Dirty Harry, when a gang tries to rob the bank across the street from Inspector Harry Callahan's favorite hot dog stand. He looks up irritably as sirens sound, guns fire, cars start crashing. Then he strolls out into the street, still chewing his food as he unlimbers his .44 Magnum, wounds one of the miscreants and opens his immortal dialogue with the man ("I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five." "Action is character," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notebook when he was trying to master the screenwriter's trade. But that is not always true. Sometimes in the movies, action is just action, and therefore becomes a frustration to players who regard themselves primarily as character actors.
