NAME: Clint Eastwood

AGE: 73

NATIONALITY: All-American

CLAIM TO FAME: Recipient of the 9th Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award

THE Screen Actors Guild Awards are the last of the major ceremonial honours in Hollywood’s run-up to the Oscars. Daniel Day-Lewis was chosen best male actor for playing Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York and Renee Zellweger named best female actor in the musical Chicago. But it was the legendary screen icon, Clint Eastwood, known for riding off into the sunset in many a Westerns, who bagged the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award at the 9th SAG Awards for memorable performances in films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).

With his rugged looks and icon status, Clint Eastwood is one of the few actors whose name on a movie marquee can still guarantee a hit. Less well-known (at least until he won the Academy Award as Best Director for Unforgiven), is the fact that Eastwood is also a producer/director.

The awards were presented during a two-hour ceremony at the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles. Two randomly-selected panels representing 4,200 SAG members chose this year’s nominees. The entire active membership of the guild, about 98,000 members, voted for the winners.

Born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, the tall, soft-spoken and leathery leading man, Clint Eastwood, rose from the world of TV Westerns to become the number-one box-office star in the world.

Eastwood grew up in Depression-era California, where his parents were itinerant workers. After high school, he worked as a lumberjack in Oregon, played honky-tonk piano and was a swimming instructor in the US Army. Signed by Universal, one of his first experiences with the indignity actors must suffer was in a Francis the Talking Mule movie, Francis in the Navy (1955). Many B-movies later, he moved to New York and gained recognition as trail boss Rowdy Yates in the successful TV series Rawhide (1959-66).

Eastwood’s second famed screen incarnation was ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan, the cop of Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971). His friendship with Ronald Reagan has attracted criticism from some, but Eastwood’s concern for the environment, he claims, would make him befriend any president.

Eastwood’s popularity declined by the late 1980s as the fifth Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988), was far less successful than its predecessors. He enjoyed a triumph with Unforgiven (1992), a Western that earned Eastwood Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director as well as several other major awards.

The political thriller, In the Line of Fire (1993), was a later-day blockbuster along with A Perfect World (also 1993). Eastwood’s film adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County (1995) was received with much aplomb. In Absolute Power (1997), he began to address the issue of age, which was an indication that he was taking his age seriously. Was he?