Clint Eastwood Almost Quit Acting After Awful First Film

The movie star caught the film, Ambush at Cimarron Pass, at a cinema in North Hollywood and couldn't believe how bad it was.

He explains, "It was probably the worst film ever made but I had the second lead in it and an actor named Scott Brady was the lead. The film was made in eight days... I went to see it and I said, 'I'm through. I've got to go back to school. I've got to do something else, I've got to get a job of other sorts'."

But while he was still figuring out what to do next, Eastwood ran into a studio executive casting TV western Rawhide over lunch - and the rest is history.

He tells The Hollywood Reporter, "I was having tea with a lady who I knew, who was an older woman who was a reader at CBS and we were standing there and this guy comes up to me in the hall and says, 'What's your name, boy?' I said, 'Clint Eastwood', and he goes, 'Are you an actor?' And I said, 'Yeah'. And he says, 'Come into my office a minute'.

"I'm going, 'Who the hell is this guy...?' So I go in and it turns out he's in charge of production there, so they cast (me)... I was testing at a studio... and they gave me a page of dialogue, an absolute page, no other actor there and I had to run in and start talking to the camera. I said, 'I can't learn this in five minutes. There's no way'. But, fortunately, I just learned what the intent was, I came in and improvised the whole thing. The director, who was the director/writer, didn't like me right away because I didn't use any of his dialogue.

"As I left there was another actor saying the same lines and he was saying them all perfectly... I said, 'Oh, that guy's got the part', so I went home that night... and then the next day they called up and said, 'There you are'. So that gave me six years of work."