“All I wanted was a role, a job… and sleeping with Marilyn Monroe”: Clint Eastwood recalls his debut.

The year is 1956. Clint Eastwood has been trying unsuccessfully to pursue an acting career in Hollywood for a year. We only got a quick glimpse of him in Revenge of the Creature and three other movies where he is either unnamed or seen with a helmet and we only see his eyes. But that’s all about to change, he thinks, as he’s well on his way to landing a headliner.

She was so beautiful

Director Joshua Logan, also a famous theater director and author, is preparing a feature film with Marilyn Monroe and needs a young role to play opposite his world star. Eastwood remembered that time on the pages of the magazine paradeHe said in 2021:

“When I was little, I was considered ‘the bus stop.’ The director, Josh Logan, had to choose between me and John Smith, because he was too good-looking to do it.”

Bus Stop tells the story of a somewhat naive cowboy’s encounter with a saloon singer whom he wants to convince to marry and settle in Montana. Adapted from the play, the film is Marilyn Monroe’s first personal production, working on her accent and her clothes to match her character.

For Clint Eastwood, playing this cowboy is especially exciting for one reason, which he told the world In 2019: “We were supposed to see each other on Monday. But on Sunday evening they called me and said there was no point in bothering me because they had just hired a certain Don Murray. I was disappointed. But that’s inevitable in a career, you’re close, but no, you’re so far away, in fact, I just wanted a role, a job and sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, maybe it was a lot, but that’s understandable, I was young.”

and then

Bus Stop will be a success and launch the Hollywood career of Don Murray, a New York actor who had never made a feature film before and left us this year. As for Bus Stop Rejected Eastwood, he continued to move from small roles to small roles until three years later he joined the Western series Rawhide, which he starred in for eight seasons from 1959 to 1965.

In this series, he is noticed by Sergio Leone, who hires him in A Fistful of Dollars, and the rest is part of great cinema history.