Million Dollar Baby
2005
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Eastwood has received multiple awards and nominations for his work in the films Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, among others. These awards include Academy Awards , Directors Guild of America Awards , Golden Globe Awards , and People's Choice Awards .
2005 Winner Oscar. Best Motion Picture of the Year. Million Dollar Baby. Shared with: Albert S. Ruddy · Tom Rosenberg. 2005 Nominee Oscar. Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role. Million Dollar Baby. 7 more. Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA. 2011 Nominee Saturn Award. Best Director. Hereafter.
- Overview
- Early life and career
- First directorial efforts
Malpaso is Clint Eastwood's production company.
For which movies did Clint Eastwood win two Academy Awards each?
Clint Eastwood won Academy Awards for best picture and best director for Unforgiven (1992), a film that takes an unsentimental look at frontier violence, and Million Dollar Baby (2004), about an aspiring female boxer.
What was the first film Clint Eastwood directed?
Clint Eastwood first turned to directing with his film Play Misty for Me (1971).
When did Eastwood receive the French Legion of Honor?
During the Great Depression, Eastwood moved with his family a number of times before they finally settled in Piedmont, California, in 1940. He was drafted during the Korean War and stationed in California. Following his discharge from the army in 1953, Eastwood moved to Hollywood. A screen test with Universal in 1954 netted him a 40-week contract, but, after one renewal and a series of bit parts in such movies as Tarantula (1955) and Revenge of the Creature (1955), his option was dropped. He appeared in several TV series before he got his big break in 1959 by being cast as Rowdy Yates in the popular TV western Rawhide (1959–65).
Eastwood achieved international stardom during this same period when he played The Man with No Name—a laconic, fearless gunfighter whose stoicism masks his brutality—in three Italian westerns (popularly known as “spaghetti westerns”) directed by Sergio Leone: Per un pugno di dollari (1964; A Fistful of Dollars), Per qualche dollari in più (1965; For a Few Dollars More), and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). In 1967 the three films played in the United States and were immediate commercial successes, establishing Eastwood as a box-office star.
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Eastwood turned to directing in such films as the thriller Play Misty for Me (1971), the westerns High Plains Drifter (1972) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and the espionage thriller The Eiger Sanction (1975), all films in which he also played leading roles. Eastwood took over the western The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) from Philip Kaufman, who cowrote the story of a Missouri farmer driven to violence after his family has been slaughtered by renegade Union soldiers. Stylishly photographed by Bruce Surtees, with a fine performance by Chief Dan George as a Cherokee elder, this work humanized Eastwood’s mythic avenger archetype for the first time.
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Eastwood went on to make The Gauntlet (1977), a kinetic but formulaic action film in which he played a police detective trying to transport a witness (Sondra Locke) to an Arizona courthouse where she can testify. The gentle good humour pervading Bronco Billy (1980) was far removed from the mayhem of his westerns and cop movies; Eastwood was deft as the proprietor of a two-bit Wild West show who gives shelter to, then falls in love with, a runaway heiress (Locke). Firefox (1982) was a high-tech Cold War story that had Eastwood as a pilot stealing a supersonic jet from the Soviets. The whimsical and sentimental Honkytonk Man (1982), set during the Great Depression, featured Eastwood as a country singer dying of tuberculosis whose dream is to make it to the Grand Ole Opry before he passes on.
Having wandered rather far afield from his star action persona, Eastwood directed the fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), with Locke portraying a rape victim on a vengeful murder spree. He then returned to his screen roots with the neo-mythic Pale Rider (1985), a quasi-religious western. It showcased Eastwood’s iconic presence and Surtees’s gorgeous photography and was one of the few hit westerns of the 1980s.
Heartbreak Ridge (1986) was an enjoyable drama about an old-school marine sergeant (Eastwood) on the verge of retirement whose tough approach whips a group of raw recruits into shape for the invasion of Grenada. White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) was Eastwood’s most audacious project of this period of his career, an adaptation of Peter Viertel’s roman à clef about his on-location collaboration with director John Huston on The African Queen (1951). Bravely tackling the part of Huston, Eastwood embodied the great director’s rugged physical presence.
- Michael Barson
Best Picture: Unforgiven. U nforgiven also won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman), Directing (Clint Eastwood), and Film Editing (Joel Cox). Clint Eastwood was the fourth actor in Oscar history to win an Academy Award for directing a movie in which he also starred.
65th Academy Awards. With his mom. The Bridges of Madison County. Receiving the Thalberg Award. Founded two jazz labels.
Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Producer of the Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor, for his work in the films "Unforgiven" (1992) and "Million Dollar Baby" (2004).
He has received five Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award and five People's Choice Awards.
