Finally, later in 1956, he landed the role of "Will Jennings" (a lab assistant) in

Such was Clint Eastwood's life as an eager young contract player at Universal. It turned out to be a short one--the studio dropped him after a year and a half, telling him his Adam's apple was so large it distracted from his face. Coincidently, Universal dropped another contract player that day as well, another actor who they felt had no future, a fella named BURT REYNOLDS.
 

He then returned to what young actors do: acting classes, constant workouts at the gym, auditions, and the never-ending odd jobs. Once in a while, he would land a small TV acting job. He was cast as a cop, Joe Keeley, in the 1956 episode "Motorcycle A" on "Highway Patrol". He landed a western role ("John Lucas" in the episode "The Letter" on "Death Valley Days",-1956), and a small part in the episode "White Fury" on "West Point Stories" in 1957. He would later play, Red Hardigan, a villain to James Garner's lead character, "Brett Maverick" in the episode "Duel at Sundown" on the Warner Bros.' big-time hit western "Maverick" (1959).

Clint was free of his Universal contract so he was no longer restricted to the bit parts which he was assigned in the Universal films. Now bitten by "the acting bug", Clint was determined to succeed in the movie business. Lacking the security of the weekly Universal paycheck, as Clint remembers, "Made me go out and struggle". While he struggled with agents, auditions, cattle-calls, bit parts in movies ("Away All Boats"-Jeff Chandler, "Star in the Dust" -Director-Charles Haas) during 1956, he remembered the successful strategy he employed on the Universal lot, and applied a similar technique, this time at Howard Hughes' RKO-Radio Pictures. This time, it would be much easier. Arthur Lubin, the director who had taken him under his wing at Universal, was now scheduled to do a couple of pictures for RKO. Not only did Lubin direct Clint's screen test and push Universal to sign him, he was the director on several of Clint's first movies ("Francis in the Navy", "Lady Godiva") in 1955. Lubin had first seen Clint's potential from his tall, lanky body, unusual rugged good looks, and easy demeanor. When he started to work with the new bit player, he found a young man eager to learn all facets of the movie business. He appreciated Clint's inquisitive nature and enjoyed sharing his years of knowledge with the young upstart. They became close friends and Lubin has been acknowledged as a mentor to both Clint's acting, and more so, directing careers.

Lubin, acting as Clint's agent, cast him as "Dumbo", a pilot in "Escapade in Japan" (1957) which starred 7 year old Jon Provost. Provost would go on to replace Tommy Rettig as the star of  television's longest running and most successful family show, "Lassie".

 He did manage to score good billing in the feature film:

                                     "The First Traveling Saleslady"
 In his first romantic outing, Clint Eastwood (as Jack Rice) is cast as Carol Channing's love interest.   
Despite co-starring Ginger Rogers, as well as another future famed TV cowboy star, James Arness, the film was a major flop at the box office.

Later he thought that he had landed second lead in another major feature:
          
 "Lafayette Escadrille"
(AKA "Hell Bent For Glory"-1958)
 Unfortunately, when Paul Newman dropped out for the lead, the role went to Tab Hunter.
 Famed director, "Wild Bill" Wellman thought Clint was too tall for his part opposite Hunter, so David Janssen was cast in the role. So instead, Clint had to settle for "George Mosely" a much smaller part. "Wild Bill" Wellman, whose career began in silent pictures, directed "Wings" (1927) which won the very first Academy Award for Best Picture. He was an ace fighter pilot with the famed Lafayette Flying Corps in WWI and the failure of this tale of his famed flying outfit, drove him to an early retirement. He remained very close, personal friends with Clint thereafter, until his death in 1972.

 Clint finally landed a decent part (third billed behind stars Scott Brady and Margia Dean) in the B western,                
"Ambush At Cimarron Pass"
The movie from first time Director, Jodie Copeland, was strapped with a budget so low that the western movie could only afford to hire a couple horses.
After viewing the final cut of the film, Clint's personal appraisal of the film:
"the lousiest western ever made".

 After four years of the archetypal show-biz struggles, another fluke encounter comes Clint's way (again thanks to old buddy, and his former agent/manager and mentor, Director Arthur Lubin. Clint was visiting Sonia Chernus, Lubin's longtime secretary, who was now employed as a story consultant at CBS, where she was helping Lubin develop the soon-to-be hit TV show "Mr. Ed" . While strolling down one of the network's corridors, Robert Sparks, an executive producer for CBS, popped out of his door, took a long look at the good-looking young man, and asked,
           
                  "Are you an actor?"
Well, it didn't take long for Clint to rattle off his illustrious list of credits with special emphasis on that blockbuster western " Ambush At Cimarron Pass". Fortunately for Clint, Sparks had missed that one. The exec dragged Clint down to the office of Charles Marques Warren, the creator of TV's longest running hit western "Gunsmoke", who just happened to be developing a new western series for CBS. It turned out they were looking for a young actor for the second lead in the projected hour long western series called  "Rawhide". A screen test was hastily arranged and Eastwood was accepted for the part. That day proved to be the birth of rugged, young cowhand, Rowdy Yates, the ramrod on the longest running cattle drive in history. That day could also have been the birth of the 50+ year career of film legend, Clint Eastwood. This role would enable Clint to achieve his first fame and, if not fortune, definitely financial security, and fan adulation, from the hit television series which would run for a remarkable seven years. Clint had truly arrived!

Rowdy Yates epitomized the characters that Clint portrayed during those early years in his career, a nice young man, politely spoken and highly principled.

Clint's description of his Rawhide character, Rowdy Yates:
"not very interesting".
He later characterized him as:
"the idiot of the plains"

  Clint once confided to an interviewer that he knew he
"wouldn't make any impact until [his] 30s".
  He knew that, in those days, he still looked like he was about 18 and:
"had a certain amount of living to do".

Unfortunately (career-wise), he was still playing Rowdy when he did reach his early 30s, which he found terribly frustrating. Hoping to escape the clutches of type-casting, he was always on the lookout for a project which could show he was capable of playing other types. In 1964, Italian director, Sergio Leone, was searching for a "Name" American actor to play the lead in a low budget western, "The Magnificent Stranger", which he was going to shoot in Spain and Italy. Leone had made his name shooting low budget "sword and sandal" epics which had been popular in the late 50's and early 60's. Leone passed on Richard Harrison, an actor who had starred in several of these Italian productions, in hope of signing Henry Fonda, his favorite choice for the part. Fonda's agent refused to even submit the script to his client. Leone next considered Rory Calhoun, an American western star who had starred in his first film, "Colossus of Rhodes", but, for whatever reason, that failed to materialize. His next choice, Charles Bronson, passed on the offer, and finally James Colburn agreed to play the part, but he insisted on $25,000. Leone's producers refused, sticking to their budgeted $15,000 (ironically, Fonda, Bronson, and Colburn would later star in Leone's later westerns). Leone now was forced to consider a lesser name and offered the part to Henry Silva. Silva happened to have the same agent as Clint (William Morris Agency) so while he was holding out for $16,000, they sent Eastwood a copy of the script. As Clint tells it:
"The agency called and asked if I was interested in doing a western in Italy and Spain. I said, 'Not particularly.' They said, 'Why don't you give the script a quick look?' Well, I was kind of curious, so I read it, and I recognized it right away as Yojimbo (1961), a Kurosawa film I had liked a lot. Over I went, taking the poncho with me."
He agreed to the leading film role which would require that he spend the 1964 Rawhide hiatus in Spain. He recognized the risk making a western for a then unknown Italian director. His $15,000 salary was minimal, the professional prestige was nonexistent, but the film did offer Clint an opportunity to finally play a role very different from Rowdy:

 "a grizzled adult, tough and morally ambiguous, who never hesitated to kill when necessary".

Few critics have acknowledged Eastwood's nerve and insight for the risky, imaginative leap this undertaking represented. He had the foresight, plus the courage it required, to willfully subvert his safe, boyish image of TV's Rowdy Yates. By taking this long shot, he accomplished what few television stars could do, make the leap to stardom in Motion Pictures. Only Steve McQueen and James Garner have come close, while TV Western stars of the day, Clint Walker (Cheyenne), Will Hutchins (Sugerfoot), Nick Adams (The Rebel), and Clint's personal favorite, Lawman's John Russell, all settled for minor roles before fading from the spotlight. By taking this professional risk, Clint not only ended his long acting apprenticeship, he was about to become a true rarity in the motion picture industry, an entirely self-made STAR.

Sergio Leone's film, "Per un Pugno di Dollari" was released in Italy and received an unexpected, overwhelming response.  Its popularity spread throughout Europe and into countries west.

His cowboy character, with a variety of names (even "no name"), The Stranger, Blondie, Joe, The Preacher, to name a few, appeared in a dozen Western films, aging before the eyes of audiences, eventually retiring as William 'Bill' Munny (the old, burned-out gunslinger), in 1992's Academy Award winning classic
         "Unforgiven".

"I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn't,"
 "But I guess when I got into cowboy gear
I looked enough like one to convince people that I was."

Surely, there were short, chubby, talkative cowhands in the Old West, but in Hollywood, these guys are called "Sidekicks". In the movies, the classic western heroes have always been tall, thin, laconic--and usually, low talking and flinty-eyed. Does the name John Wayne ring a bell? Clint looked the part, and he gained his first featured movie roles ("The First Traveling Saleslady", "Ambush at Cimarron Pass"), his first taste of fame (Rowdy Yates - Rawhide), the beginnings of his international film stardom (three spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone) a twenty year film career (a dozen western characters) and finally, the ultimate coup, his Academy Awards (Unforgiven), all for playing the role of the quintessential "cowboy hero".

When he left for Italy to film 'A Fistful of Dollars", Eastwood thought:

 "the western was in a dead place, encrusted with myth,
poetry, stale pictorialism and simple moralizing."

 The thing that drew him to this unlikely, low-paying project was the innate quality that has earned it and his other two Leone films so much disapproval when they first appeared--their straightforward, darkly comic insistence on the primitive and entirely ignoble nature of frontier life. The impact on the genre by Leone's western trilogy was ultimately liberating, both for Clint Eastwood as well as to most of the others working within the form. In the first Leone film, Clint's character was styled as "a grizzled Christ figure" (to use critic Richard Corliss' phrase) who undergoes a Calvary and a resurrection before bringing redemption--at the end of his gun barrel--to the hellish Mexican border town of San Miguel.
* Author Note: "Those critics sure get a lot out of movies".
Leone and Eastwood were both in for a rapid ride to international cinema fame, fortune, and in Clint's case, motion picture stardom. Thus begins Clint's next chapter in his rise to become "America's Living Legend".