Since the mid-1960s, we have known Clint Eastwood most prominently for his roles as ‘The Man With No Name’ in Sergio Leone’s beloved spaghetti western Dollars Trilogy and renegade cop Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry films, amongst many others. However, like many of Hollywood’s favourite stars, Eastwood’s entry into the industry was not always plain sailing.
According to Eastwood’s biographer Patrick McGilligan, he met a photographer called Chuck Hill, who would play an instrumental part in getting Eastwood’s career off the ground. Hill urged Eastwood to audition at Universal Pictures for the director Arthur Lubin when he moved from Northern California to Los Angeles.
Eastwood had no acting experience, but he was handsome and looked glorious in front of the camera. Universal decided to offer Eastwood a $75-per-week contract while he took acting classes at the studio. He finally had his foot in the acting door, but towards the end of the 1950s, his hope of making it to the big time had started to f ade. The acting work at Universal began to dry up. He was still managing to score small TV roles, mostly “motorcycle hoods and lab assistants”, but his big break was still remaining elusive. Eventually, that break came, although Eastwood later admitted that it was something of a “fluke”.
“I was visiting a friend at CBS,” Eastwood said in retrospect in an interview with Rex Reed. “And an executive saw me drinking coffee in the cafeteria and came over and asked me to test. It was a fluke.” That test was to be for the CBS TV show Rawhide, in which Eastwood portrayed the young and tempestuous cattle drover Rowdy Yates.
It was from his success in Rawhide over eight seasons of the show that Eastwood decided to take a gamble on one of the roles that he would be most acclaimed for. He then told Reed: “In the sixth year, I had exhausted everything I could do on a horse, so I took a hiatus and went to Spain to make Fistful of Dollars. I had nothing to lose. I had a job waiting in TV, and I knew if it was a flop, nobody would ever see it anyway.”
It was in Sergio Leone’s first film of the Dollars Trilogy (all of which featured Eastwood) that the legendary actor was introduced to the world on a major scale. However, without the “fluke” screen test that led him to play in Rawhide, it’s unlikely that the legendary actor would have ever had the confidence to take a gamble on the western classic.