Clint Eastwood is one of the living legends of cinema along with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Amazingly, he will be 80 this year, but the stream of movies he is both acting in and directing shows no let-up: 2009 has already seen his acclaimed performance in Gran Torino and his praised direction of Angelina Jolie in Changeling. But this is the first full biography for 15 years, and the first to be neither hagiography or hatchet-job. It covers Eastwood's transmutation from generic hard-bitten mean dude in spaghetti westerns like A Fistful of Dollars, through even more hard-bitten enforcers like Dirty Harry to a new, more contemplative and cerebral role as a director, of mournful jazz films like Bird and moody masterpieces like The Unforgiven. Marc Eliot has a good track record with Aurum for his biographies of Cary Grant and James Stewart both successful in hardback and paperback and achieving serial sales.
