Clint Eastwood, who enjoyed a popular success in the long-running Rawhide television series, shot to international stardom as The Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy in the 1960s and to international super-stardom as Dirty Harry in the early 1970s. Forty years on, In the Line of Fire and the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, he remains at the very top of his profession, as actor, director, producer and composer, his popularity undimmed.

Audiences loved him from the very start. The Eastwood persona – cool, steely, laconic – rarely failed at the box office. Critical acclaim took longer to arrive, but arrive it did. Today he is recognised as a major cinematic talent, his achievements as actor, director and producer universally acknowledged.

In this book, Robert Tanitch chronicles Eastwood’s career film by film with wit and clarity, highlighting both Eastwood’s performance and the wider values of the film itself. Quotes from contemporary reviews, both British and American, offer independent and sometimes markedly varying critical insights into Clint Eastwood’s work.

Eastwood is a handsomely illustrated record of a remarkable career and a celebration of one of the famous icons of the twentieth and now the twenty-first century.