Thought Clint was cool? Ask his daughter!
AS most dads know, it is virtually impossible to appear cool to your children. But with Father’s Day around the corner they can take heart that it was the same for Clint Eastwood.
The Dirty Harry star may have been admired around the world for his tough guy image, but to his children he was still a ‘big dork’.
Eastwood has admitted they were embarrassed at having him drop them off at school despite his iconic status.
‘My youngest daughter, Morgan, when I’d drop her off at school, she’d say, ‘‘You can drop me off here. It’s OK,’’ revealed the Oscar-winning actor and director who is now 86. ‘The first couple of times it happens you think, ‘‘Hey, they’re ashamed of me!’’.’
Morgan, now 20, wasn’t the only one of Eastwood’s eight children to worry what her friends would think about her dad. ‘I’m sure I did that too,’ Alison, 44, said of distancing herself from her famous father as a teen.
‘But you come back around and think, ‘‘Why would I ever have thought that person was a big dork? I love that person!’’ It’s human nature to create that separation and then you make your way back around.’
Twice-married Eastwood’s complex personal life – he fathered his children with six different women – meant his home life was unconventional.
But the star, currently directing Sully, a film with Tom Hanks about the pilot who heroically landed his stricken passenger plane on New York’s Hudson River in 2009, said of his children: ‘I want the same thing for them that every parent wants. For them to have a good life, a healthy life. You try to give them ideas about certain things.’
Scott, Eastwood’s 30-year-old actor son, said: ‘Dad was pretty old school. My first car cost $1,000 and I had to buy every car after that.’
Musician Kyle told the Los Angeles Times: ‘Dad’s always given us the advice to be serious about what you do and work hard at it.’