Shawn Levy’s Clint Eastwood biography captures the contradictions of a screen icon — and the craft behind a career still shaping popular cinema.

Clint Eastwood, 95, has embodied two great but contradictory maxims.

His essential on-screen technique has followed the teachings of Jack Kosslyn, his second acting coach from way back in the 1950s: “Don’t just do something; stand there!”

And the core of his half-century of movie-making dovetails with the oft-quoted advice of Hawthorn’s breakthough triple-premiership coach John Kennedy: “Don’t think; just do!”

Shawn Levy neatly details both faces of the icon in the latest of many Eastwood biographies: _Clint. The Man and his Movies_ (Mariner Books, released July 2025).

At almost 500 pages, it’s perhaps 50 (if not 100) too many, detailing faithfully the plots and the takings of each of Eastwood’s scores of movies as well as giving a sample of published reviews as well as the author’s own take.

But it is the way that Levy explores Eastwood’s choices – personal and especially professional – that is the great strength of the book, leaving the feeling that the great man has been under-rated, for varying reasons, across all seven decades (so far) of his acting and directing careers.

Early on, there is a comparison with John Wayne, to many the cinematic apogee of the American male. Eastwood knocked the one-dimensional Wayne off top spot in the Quigley poll of moneymaking stars way back in 1972, with “The Duke” never returning. Eastwood did this after the release of Dirty Harry, which was of course his third screen persona after Rowdy Yates in Rawhide and “The Man with No........

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