By Cory Franklin | October 10th, 2025

Last February during one sad week, three figures, luminaries in their respective fields, died: Roberta Flack, she of the ethereal voice; Clint Hill, possibly the most heroic Secret Service agent of our lifetime; and Gene Hackman, one of the best actors of this generation. What did these three exemplars in quite different professions have in common?

Answer: Clint Eastwood, who as of Thursday October 10^th is very much alive.

In 1969, Roberta Flack recorded the folk song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and although her recording was not released until 1972, Clint Eastwood heard it shortly before release and paid $2000 to use her version in his film, Play Misty for Me.  The song became a major plot point in the movie, and partly because of that, Ms. Flack’s version became the biggest selling record of 1972. In 1973, it earned her Grammy Awards for both Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

When President John F. Kennedy was felled by an assassin’s bullets on November 22, 1963, Clint Hill was the Secret Service agent who climbed on the back of the presidential limousine to shield First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy after the shots were fired. Hill risked his life and jumped onto the car during its rapid acceleration to the hospital. While he was decorated for bravery, he suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress years later because he believed he could have saved the president.

Hill was in part the model for Clint Eastwood’s character in the 1993 movie that Eastwood directed and starred in, In the Line of Fire, about a Secret Service agent, veteran of the JFK assassination, who attempts to foil a new presidential assassination attempt.

Gene Hackman was the costar of Eastwood’s 1992 Academy Award winning film, Unforgiven. In it, Hackman played a vicious sheriff, opposite Eastwood’s avenging gunslinger. For one of the best performances of Hackman’s career, he received the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

The connection of these three disparate figures with Clint Eastwood illustrates the extent of his cinematic influence. Unquestionably a Hollywood legend – one of the industry’s greatest – he is easily overlooked because he is neither the movies’ best actor nor its best director. But he is probably the greatest actor-turned-director in the history of American cinema.

As an actor, Clint Eastwood’s unique career started out in1950s drive-in movies. He was a foil to Francis, the Talking Mule, and a bit player in 1950s monster flicks (check him out in the 1955 classic, Tarantula, as the jet squadron leader who helps destroy the giant spider threatening an Arizona town.)  He then became a television heartthrob as Rowdy Yates in the long-running 1960s TV Western, Rawhide. As Rawhide was winding down, he gained worldwide acclaim as the taciturn hero, The Man with No Name, in Italian director Sergio Leeone’s “spaghetti Westerns.” Even though Eastwood spoke little Italian and Leone no English, these films have become international cinema classics.

When Eastwood returned to the United States, he was a bona fide movie star appearing with luminaries including Richard Burton, Lee Marvin, and Shirley MacLaine. He created the iconic character Dirty Harry Callahan, a San Francisco cop perpetually outraged by the contempt for the law he encounters in his job – presaging the actual lawlessness in that city in real life. He had a brief directing scene in Dirty Harry, and then a full director role in Play Misty For Me. With that, Eastwood began one of the Hollywood’s greatest careers as a director.

Since 1971, he has directed 45 movies, including two for which he earned the Academy Award for Best Director, both of which were coincidentally the Best Picture of the Year (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.)  He retains the honor of being the oldest director to win an Oscar, at 74, and he has received two other Oscar nominations for Best Director and three other nominations for Best Picture.

Besides countless other awards and recognitions including the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award, he has received two of France’s highest honors: being named Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and being awarded the Légion d’honneur. His films, almost all of which are financially successful, run the gamut of subjects including westerns, war movies, biographies, and adaptations of popular novels.

When compared with others on the list of great actors-turned-directors (considering only those who actually had careers as actors rather than directors like John Ford who appeared briefly in movies), Clint Eastwood is clearly in the rarified company of legends like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and Sir Laurence Olivier.  And it’s not a stretch to say that as a director, he outshines all of them – none comes close to the body of work he compiled.

Charlie Chaplin is one of the two great Hollywood film comedians, along with Buster Keaton, and some consider Chaplin to be the industry’s greatest actor-turned-director. Certainly, one of Hollywood’s first geniuses, most of his greatest work as a director was in silent films. He did direct three or four talkies that can be considered classics, but besides those, his work as a director in the sound era was at best uneven and certainly not on a par with Eastwood’s.

Likewise, Orson Welles, “the boy genius.” The man who directed Citizen Kane and several other masterpieces never realized his full promise either as an actor or a director, for reasons both personal and political. Welles never won an Academy Award for his directing (although he should have won for Kane). By the 1960s, Orson Welles’ career became one of unfulfilled potential.

Lord Olivier really never directed films in the US and his career as a director was primarily confined to Shakespearean productions in Great Britain (he did direct Marilyn Monroe in the ill-fated 1957 film, The Prince and the Showgirl.) In terms of film direction, his canon does not compare to Eastwood’s.

If there was one British actor-turned-director comparable to Eastwood, it might be Richard Attenborough, who won one Academy Award as a director (for Gandhi). Had Ida Lupino had not been constrained by male-dominated Hollywood, the supremely talented actor-turned-director she might have had done as much good work as Eastwood.

Other actor-turned directors who merit mention in the discussion are Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, and Mel Brooks. All three have made their mark in Hollywood, but none of them has a resume as an actor or a director that Eastwood does.

If there is one person with a lifetime record that rivals Eastwood’s as an actor-director, it is Woody Allen. His career has been as long, he has won many awards, and he has many devoted followers. But Woody Allen has really only acted in his own movies as opposed to the multifaceted Eastwood, who was an international movie star and television star as well.

Also, Woody Allen has never ventured from the sophisticated urban comedy/drama oeuvre, where Eastwood has taken far more chances as a director.

Having just turned 95, Clint Eastwood has been in Hollywood for 70 years, remaking his persona at different intervals: jet pilot who kills giant tarantulas, TV Western hero, The Man with No Name, Dirty Harry, and an illustrious film director.

If there were ever a Mount Rushmore for Hollywood actor-turned-directors, Clint Eastwood’s face should be most prominently featured.

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Cory Franklin, physician and writer, is a frequent contributor to johnkassnews.com. Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for 25 years, before retiring he wrote over 80 medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. In 1999, he was awarded the Shubin-Weil Award, one of only fifty people ever honored as a national role model for the practice and teaching of intensive care medicine. 

Since retirement, Dr. Franklin has been a contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. His work has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times and excerpted in the New York Review of Books. Internationally, his work has appeared internationally in Spiked, The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. For nine years he hosted a weekly audio podcast, Rememberingthepassed, which discusses the obituaries of notable people who have died recently. His 2015 book “Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases” was a medical history best-seller. In 2024, he co-authored The COVID Diaries: Anatomy of a Contagion As it Happened.

In 1993, he worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was a role model for the physician character Ford played in the film, The Fugitive.