Clint and Dennis

Last Monday Clint Eastwood reached the age of 80 and he is not at all in decline; on the contrary, he's still making films - two in the offing - and I think he is making better films now than he's ever made. He started late, in his thirtees, in star-acting roles having made a series of films and TV shows playing bit parts. But once he had established himself as a certain sort of actor: the man with no name, the tough hombre who stands up for what is right against "punks" and political correctness, he was made for life. "Liberal" is the last word that could be applied to the roles he played (maybe I should say rather cynically, the role he played because they were pretty well all the same character).
Dennis Hopper was another actor who pretty well played the same sort of guy in all the films he made: violent usually or if not violent, carrying the threat in his character to become violent. He too directed a few films, "Easy Rider" being the first and probably the best (I did not like it because I thought it idolised a way of life that was wholly without any moral substance). There were others but none are much good. Acting is what he excelled at. To paraphrase what someone said that in every fat man there was a thin man trying to get out, with Hopper it's a case of in every short man there's a big man trying to get out.
In David Thomson's book about film stars he maintains that Cary Grant is probably the greatest film actor. I believe that too. He could play most anything: tragedy and comedy, fool or wise man, sophistication or down-and-out. He could do song and dance too in his early days. Neither Clint Eastwood nor Dennis Hopper would have got away with "song and dance"; they wouldn't even have tried. But they both reached heights of performance denied to others who may have had more talent by being themselves or at least being a character they invented.
Not many reviewers of their lives this week mentioned Clint's best film, "Mystic River" or Hopper's wonderful appearance in "Red Rock West". And no one to my knowledge mentioned Clint's performance in "True Crime" which I thought showed a development in his acting I believed him incapable of achieving (funny too); or Hopper's late appearance in the first series of "24" which suddenly made you sit up and take notice.
Many times married, both of them (once is enough!). In Cary Grant maybe there was a feminine streak. Not in them. Wholly heterosexual was their stock in trade.