Like so many others, Clint Eastwood was one of those 15-year overnight successes.
Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds were about the same age; both were born in 1936. In the 1950s, both were young aspiring actors (without, to my knowledge, a background on the stage) who hoped to make it in the film industry.
One of the studio execs told both of these guys they would never make it. Clint was told he had an annoying lump in his throat; Burt was told he couldn’t act. The joke Burt told was that he turned to Clint and said, “I can learn to act, but you can't do anything about your throat.”
Burt Reynolds told that story, anyway.
Rewinding a bit: Clint worked a number of jobs as a young man and was about to apply to and enter Seattle University, but then was drafted during the Korean War. But he never liked to brag about that service, because, he said, he’d spent the entire war as a lifeguard at Fort Ord in Northern California. While he was at Fort Ord, he was spotted by a Hollywood exec who thought Clint, this lanky, slender lifeguard (six foot four), might be good in the action-adventure films of the day.
He was invited to come to Los Angeles, but as I related a few paragraphs above, most people weren’t impressed at first. He got a screen test, but the camera man, who arranged the test, said: “He was quite amateurish. He didn't know which way to turn or which way to go or do anything.”
And people noticed he had a way of saying his lines through clenched teeth, a trademark he never quite gave up.
But on advice from others, Clint took acting lessons, and to judge from the results, eventually got much, much better. (So, acting lessons can help.) He went out on a lot of auditions, was rejected many times, but eventually was cast in a minor role in “Revenge of the Creature” (1955), a sequel to “Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
After playing small roles, his big break was the TV show, “Rawhide” (1959). Later, he was cast in Spaghetti Westerns, no doubt on the basis of his work in this TV Western, and the rest is history.