Being underestimated is, for some people, a misfortune. For Clint Eastwood, it became a weapon. Certainly, no one meeting him in his twenties, before his movie career began, would have seen much more than a good-looking Californian who loved beer, women, cars and noodling at the piano – a fun guy to hang out with.
Since those unprepossessing days, he has done the following: starred in a hit television show, Rawhide; appeared in more than 50 movies and directed 31, often acting, directing and producing at the same time; added several menacingly ironic locutions to the language, such as “Make my day”, which Ronald Reagan quoted in the face of a congressional movement to raise taxes; become a kind of mythic-heroic-redemptive figure, interacting with public desire in a way that no actor has done since John Wayne; served as the mayor of Carmel, California; won four Oscars and received many other awards, including a hug from Nicolas Sarkozy while becoming commander of the Légion d’honneur last November. Those who were sceptical of Eastwood 40 years ago (I’m one of them) have long since capitulated, retired or died. He has outlasted everyone. On Monday, rich, garlanded and exceptionally busy, he will turn 80.

Eastwood was born big – Bunyonesque big – at 11lb 6oz, in 1930, and grew up mostly in Piedmont, California, near Oakland. During the Depression, as his father found and lost jobs, the family was constantly on the move. His biographer, Richard Schickel, has suggested that this peripatetic existence may be a cause of Eastwood’s habit in his movies of appearing out of nowhere at the beginning and disappearing at the end.
The constant in Eastwood’s early life was his mother, Ruth, who collected jazz records and got her son excited about music. As a teenager, hanging around clubs in Oakland and Los Angeles, Eastwood heard such icons of the new West Coast cool style in jazz as Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker and the bebop geniuses in their early days, among them Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. As Eastwood has said, his notion of cool – slightly aloof, giving only the central satisfaction and withholding everything else – is derived from those musicians.