Why Clint Eastwood Called This Co-Star the Greatest He Ever Had

Clint Eastwood is 96 years old, and he has outlived nearly every actor on a list he recently gave — five names, drawn from more than seven decades of filmmaking, of the finest performers he ever shared a set with.

What makes this particular ranking different from any career retrospective is simple and devastating: every single man on it is dead.

This isn’t a legend reminiscing fondly about old co-stars for an interview reel. It’s one of the last living icons of the Western genre quietly drawing a line back through his own history, naming the ghosts who made him better, one at a time.

Fifth on the list is Gene Hackman, honored for his role as Little Bill Daggett in 1992’s Unforgiven.

Hackman’s road to that performance was anything but direct — abandoned by his father as a boy, he lied about his age to join the Marines at sixteen, drifted through odd jobs into his thirties, and was voted least likely to succeed by his own acting-school classmates, which included a then-unknown Dustin Hoffman.

His breakthrough came with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, followed by an Oscar-winning turn in The French Connection.

When Eastwood first approached him about Unforgiven, Hackman turned it down flatly, saying he was tired of violent filMs. Eastwood convinced him otherwise by reframing the project entirely — not as another violent Western, but as a film built to dismantle the mythology of the gunslinger from the inside.

Hackman signed on and delivered a performance so precise that Eastwood has said for decades that Hackman could do more with a half-smile and a beat of silence than most actors could with three pages of dialogue.

Hackman quietly left acting in the early 2000s and lived the rest of his life in deliberate obscurity, until he was found dead at his Santa Fe home in February 2025, alongside his wife.

Fourth is Richard Harris, who played English Bob in the same film. Harris arrived carrying decades of legend and hard living — an aspiring rugby player sidelined by tuberculosis, a serious dramatic actor by his early thirties, and a notorious fixture of Hollywood’s hardest-drinking circle alongside Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole.

By the time Eastwood called to offer him the role, Harris was so certain it was a prank that he made his wife confirm Eastwood’s name twice before picking up the phone.

Once cast, Harris pushed for English Bob to be played as a constructed fraud — a man whose entire identity was performance — making his humiliating collapse in the film’s jailhouse scene devastating precisely because there was nothing underneath.

The role helped launch a genuine late-career resurgence, including another Oscar nomination for The Field and, years later, a role that introduced him to an entirely new generation as Albus Dumbledore in the first Harry Potter filMs. Harris died in 2002, reportedly cracking a joke about hospital food to paramedics on his way out.

Third is Eli Wallach, unforgettable as Tuco in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

A Brooklyn-born, classically trained stage actor with a Tony Award to his name, Wallach so thoroughly stole the film that he nearly walked away with it entirely — something Eastwood never seemed to resent.

Filming in Spain was genuinely dangerous; Wallach was dragged by a galloping horse with his hands bound and, in another sequence, missed by a train’s iron footboard by mere inches.

He kept working well