Clint’s co-star and ex-love Sondra dies after cancer battle
Sondra Locke BORN - MAY 28, 1944 DIED - NOVEMBER 3, 2018
ACTRESS Sondra Locke has died aged 74 after a battle with cancer, it was announced yesterday.
The star is best known for her six movies with Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood, with whom she had a tumultuous 14-year relationship in the 1970s and 1980s.
Locke, who went on to become a director, died at her Los Angeles home on November 3 after suffering a heart attack which was related to her breast and bone cancer.
She earned an Oscar nomination for her debut film, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, in 1968, having landed the role after winning a nationwide talent contest.
Locke was born Sandra Louise Smith in Shelbyville, Tennessee.
Her father was in the military and her mother worked in a pencil factory but they had split up before her birth.
She worked at a radio station and appeared in a handful of plays before she entered the life-changing talent contest aged 23 and won her debut role.
She was cast opposite leading actor Alan Arkin in the movie adaptation of Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel.
She won rave reviews for the performance, along with nominations for a Golden Globe as well as the Oscar for best supporting actress. Both awards went to Ruth Gordon for Rosemary’s Baby. She became romantically involved with Eastwood in 1975 after appearing in his blockbuster western The Outlaw Josey Wales.
During their relationship, she appeared alongside him in a string of hits, including The Gauntlet, Every Which Way But Loose, Bronco Billy and Any Which Way You Can.
She also starred in the 1983 movie Sudden Impact, the fourth film in the Dirty Harry series.
They split up in 1989 after Eastwood changed the locks on their home and removed all her possessions, and she sued him for palimony. Their settlement included a £1.2million three-year deal for Locke to develop and direct films at Warner Brothers but the studio did not give the go-ahead to any of the 30 projects she pitched.
She claimed Eastwood had secretly financed the deal to sabotage her career, and in 1995 she sued him for fraud, eventually reaching a £2million settlement a year later.
Locke later wrote a memoir about their time together entitled The Good, The Bad And The Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey.
In it, she claimed she had two abortions and was sterilised while she was with Eastwood.
She had married Gordon Anderson, a childhood friend, back in 1967.
According to her death certificate, the two were still legally wed when she died, and Anderson was the person who reported her death.
Locke worked only intermittently in recent decades, though earlier this year she was seen in Ray Meets Helen, with Keith Carradine.
Leading the tributes, actress Evan Rachel Wood wrote on Twitter: “Sondra Locke directed me in my first film when I was four. She was fantastic.”