The movie icon Clint Eastwood publicly denied was his real father: “My mother was hysterical”
Since it says ‘Clinton Eastwood Jr’ on his birth certificate, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the father of Clint Eastwood is none other than Clinton Eastwood Sr, which still wasn’t enough for some.
Urban legends have a strange way of following an actor around for years, if not decades, as Richard Gere’s alleged preference for stuffing his sphincter with live gerbils can attest. Even when Eastwood denied the long-standing whispers of his true parentage, not every raised eyebrow came down.
It’s a weird thing, since nobody knows how and where it started, and it doesn’t have any basis in fact, history, or truth, other than the fact that somebody said it once, a lot of people heard it, they accepted it as fact, and it grew into a monstrosity that the four-time Academy Award winner felt he had to denounce.
There was an ever-so-slight resemblance when they were both in their younger days, and because their tufted hair sat in ever-so-slightly the same way, one bright spark conjured the notion that Eastwood’s biological father was none other than Stan Laurel, one half of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s most iconic double acts.
Making over 100 films with his partner, Oliver Hardy, the duo were one of the defining comedy partnerships of their, or any other, generation. Slapstick owes a huge amount to Laurel and Hardy, and while the former had two kids of his own, poor Ruth Eastwood was beside herself when she caught wind of the speculation that she’d stepped out on her husband for a bit of how’s yer father with a movie star.
“It’s because my hair stands up,” Eastwood matter-of-factly put it when asked about the salacious claims that the honorary Oscar winner, Lancashire-born pratfaller, and legendary comedic performer was his old man. “My mother was hysterical. She said, ‘I always admired the man, but I never met him, let alone had his child.'”
While there may well still be a hardy band of tinfoil hat-wearing types out there who refuse to believe the Dirty Harry star’s waving away of his parentage because he didn’t whip out a DNA test or any other relevant paperwork to prove it, it’s best to take him at his word, especially when he looks a lot more like Clint Eastwood Sr than he does Stan Laurel.
Was Laurel a known philanderer? Maybe, since he married three women, one of them twice, and one of them accused him of being a bigamist. Was Ruth Eastwood a known philanderer? To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no, she was not, and can you imagine what her son would do if you asked him that to his face? He’d make Harry Callahan look like a saint by comparison.
Despite there being no tangible evidence other than complete hearsay, Eastwood still felt the need to go full-blown Maury Povich and inform the world that Stan Laurel was not the father.
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