Clint Eastwood praises the only actor he has always been a fan of

Clint Eastwood has created several iconic film characters, including the nameless gunfighter from the Dollar Trilogy and the callous Inspector Callahan from Dirty Harry. But as he himself admits, he himself had a great role model: James Cagney, one of the biggest Hollywood stars of a bygone Hollywood era. Action detail from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry is stolen from James Cagney’s classic

As our sister site Xataka quotes from the book Clint Eastwood: Interviews, the actor stated at an unspecified point in his career:

I’ve never been a fan of any particular actor other than James Cagney. I always liked Cagney’s style and energy. He was fearless.

James Cagney, born in New York in 1899, is considered one of the most famous Hollywood actors of the so-called Golden Era of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. He became famous above all for his embodiment of tough gangsters, for example in The Public Enemy and Chicago – Angels with Dirty Faces. However, he won an Oscar for the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Eastwood’s adoration for Cagney went beyond mere emotion, as he revealed to Entertainment Weekly in 2008. The famous action scene from the first Dirty Harry film, in which Harry Callahan shoots several bank robbers with a hot dog still in his mouth, comes from Leap into Death from 1949:

When he eats a chicken leg in Leap to Death and a shooting guys in the trunk, you think to yourself, ‘Yeah, that’s disturbing, but in a nice way’. The Dirty Harry scene where I eat a hot dog during the shootout was based on that.

Watch the Dirty Harry scene in English here:

It is also quite possible that Eastwood and Cagney met. Cagney worked as a film and TV actor for a total of five decades and made his last appearance in the US drama Nick is in a Trouble in 1984. He died in 1986.