For his work in the films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood won Academy Awards for Best Director and Producer of the Best Picture, as well as receiving nominations for Best Actor. These films in particular, as well as others including Play Misty for Me (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Tightrope (1984), Pale Rider (1985), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), In the Line of Fire (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and Gran Torino (2008), have all received commercial success and critical acclaim. Eastwood's only comedies have been Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980), which are his two most commercially successful films after adjustment for inflation.
In addition to directing many of his own star vehicles, Eastwood has also directed films in which he did not appear, such as Mystic River (2003) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), for which he received Academy Award nominations, and Changeling (2008). He has received considerable critical praise in France, including for several films which were not well received in the United States, and he has been awarded two of France's highest honors: in 1994 he became a recipient of the French Republic's Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2007 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur medal. In 2000, he was awarded the Italian Venice Film FestivalGolden Lion for lifetime achievement.
Since 1967, Eastwood has run his own production company, Malpaso, which has produced all except four of his American films. He also served as the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California from 1986 to 1988. Eastwood has seven children by five different women, although he has only married twice.
Relationships
Twice married, Eastwood has fathered seven children by five different women. In 1968 and 1970, he respectively engaged in on-location affairs with co-stars Jean Seberg (Paint Your Wagon) and Jo Ann Harris (The Beguiled).At one point in the 1980s, Eastwood dated Barbra Streisand.Eastwood married Maggie Johnson on December 19, 1953, six months after they met on a blind date.However, their matrimony would not prove altogether smooth, with Eastwood later acknowledging that he had married at too young of an age (twenty-three). A decade later, while separated from Johnson, Eastwood engaged in an affair with Rawhide stuntwoman and bit actress Roxanne Tunis (who was also married yet separated), fathering his first child, Kimber Tunis (born June 17, 1964); he did not publicly acknowledge her until 1996. After a reconciliation, he had two children with Johnson: Kyle Eastwood (born May 19, 1968) and Alison Eastwood (born May 22, 1972). Eastwood filed for divorce in 1979 after another long separation, but the $25 million divorce settlement was not finalized until May 1984.
Eastwood entered into a relationship with co-star Sondra Locke in the fall of 1975 while shooting The Outlaw Josey Wales. Their relationship lasted almost fourteen years, despite the fact that Locke remained married to her gay husband, Gordon Anderson, throughout that period. Locke had two abortions and a tubal ligation within the first four years of the relationship. The couple co-starred in six films together: The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Every Which Way but Loose, Bronco Billy, Any Which Way You Can, and Sudden Impact. After divorcing Maggie Johnson in 1984, Eastwood asked for Locke's hand in marriage, but she refused to leave Gordon Anderson. Their relationship especially soured in the late eighties when Eastwood first learned that Locke was attempting to evict the superstar's live-in, USC student son (Kyle Eastwood) and then when Eastwood learned that Locke was discussing a palimony suit against him with a divorce lawyer. On April 10, 1989, while Locke was directing the film Impulse, Eastwood changed the locks on their Bel Air home and had many of her possessions removed and placed in storage. Locke filed a palimony suit against Eastwood, then sued him a second time for fraud, regarding an underwritten directing contract he set up for her in settlement of the first lawsuit. Eastwood and Locke finally resolved the dispute with a non-public settlement in 1999.
During the last four years of his increasingly strained relationship with the still-married Locke, Eastwood engaged in a somewhat surreptitious affair with flight attendant Jacelyn Reeves. According to biographers, the two met at a pub in Carmel and conceived a son, Scott Reeves (born March 21, 1986), at the premiere of Pale Rider. They also had a daughter, Kathryn Reeves (born February 2, 1988). The birth certificates for both children stated "Father declined." Although authorized biographer Richard Schickel mentioned them in his 1996 book about the star, Eastwood did not present his and Reeves' children to the public until 2002. Kathryn served as Miss Golden Globe at the 2005 ceremony where she presented Eastwood with an award for Million Dollar Baby.
In 1990, Eastwood began living with actress Frances Fisher, whom he had met on the set of Pink Cadillac (1989). They co-starred in Unforgiven, and had a daughter, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood (born August 7, 1993). The couple ended their relationship in early 1995, but remain friends and later acted together in True Crime.
Eastwood with wife Dina in 2007