The twist of fate that saved Clint Eastwood’s faltering career: “I said I’m through”
Nobody, least of all Clint Eastwood, could have predicted that his career would culminate in the actor and eventual director becoming an all-time great in both respects, never mind that he’d still be working in his 90s.
Success is a difficult thing to achieve in Hollywood, and longevity is every bit as difficult to maintain, making the four-time Academy Award winner one of the industry’s most remarkable figures. He’s played countless iconic characters, anchored some stone-cold cinema classics, and helmed 40 features, none of which would have happened had he followed through on an early threat to give it all up.
The hardest part of the business for any actor is breaking in, with countless aspiring thespians abandoning their dreams when the constant rejection becomes too much. Eastwood worked solidly even in his earliest days, but he was nowhere close to cracking the glass ceiling and establishing himself as a leading man.
Illustrating that point, of the 11 films he appeared in before he finally gained widespread attention with Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood went uncredited in seven of them. They were all released between 1955 and 1958, too, so landing parts wasn’t difficult in and of itself. However, being cast in substantial or worthwhile ones was an entirely different story.
Director Jodie Copelan’s western Ambush at Cimarron Pass became a defining moment in Eastwood’s fledgling filmography, placing the young actor at a crossroads. By his own admission, it was and remains one of the worst pictures he’s ever been in, and not even third billing in the cast was enough to convince the star he had what it takes to make it much further.
Playing the secondary main lead in a film being given a wide theatrical release should have been a huge moment for Eastwood. Instead, his first thought after watching it was that he needed to find himself another vocation. He’d dreamed of starring in movies, and when he finally got his biggest opportunity yet, his first reaction was one of incredulity: “I saw that film, and I said, ‘I’m through.'”
Several months later, amid an existential crisis, the most serendipitous opportunity fell into his lap. Eastwood bumped into somebody on the street who worked at CBS, discovered the network was casting for an upcoming series called Rawhide, and he ended up being hired as one of the leads. Less than a year after Ambush at Cimarron Pass had premiered, he debuted on the small screen as Rowdy Yates, and as cliched as it might sound, the rest genuinely was history.
Sometimes, all it takes is a little luck and perhaps a touch of fate to push someone in the right direction, and Eastwood never looked back after the movie that almost made him quit, which was swiftly followed by the show that made him famous.
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