Clint Eastwood wins best director Oscar for Million Dollar Baby

Clint Eastwood on Sunday won the second best director Oscar of his career for his dark female boxing drama Million Dollar Baby.

Legendary Hollywood tough guy Clint Eastwood on Sunday won the second best director Oscar of his career for his dark female boxing drama Million Dollar Baby.

Clint Eastwood's best director win for Million Dollar Baby at Sunday's Oscars marks the end of his decades-long struggle to be recognised as a serious filmmaker rather than merely an iconic tough guy.

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At 74, snagging the second Academy Award for directing of his career makes him the oldest winner of the coveted prize and confirms him as one of Hollywood's most talented, and most unconventional, filmmakers.

But after half a century in Hollywood, Eastwood is best known around the world for his steely-eyed roles in films such as Dirty Harry and as the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's 1960s "spaghetti westerns."

"People keep harking back to Dirty Harry, but that was (more than) 33 years ago, and I've just changed," Eastwood, who has directed 25 movies and produced 20, complained to one interviewer.

He made his mark as a serious filmmaker in 1993, when he won the best director Oscar for the brutal and terrifying western Unforgiven, which also earned him a best picture statuette as its producer.

That was the first time that Eastwood -- whose action films were dismissed as overly macho and bloodthirsty, despite their frequently offbeat tones -- had been considered for a major award.

Last year, his thriller Mystic River, about three old friends reunited by the murder of a child, garnered six Oscar nods -- including best picture and director -- and won two, but Eastwood himself went home empty-handed.

And even after four previous Oscar nods for directing and the huge success of Unforgiven and Mystic River, Eastwood battled to win funding for Million Dollar Baby, which was nominated for seven Oscars and won four.

Only after knocking on door after door did he persuade Warner Brothers to put up half the money, splitting the risk equally with production company Lakeshore Entertainment.

"It was turned down by a lot of people," Eastwood told The New York Times. "I wasn't coming in with a .44 Magnum and doing the old genre thing. In my old age, I'm looking for things that interest me a little more."

Eastwood's win for "Million Dollar Baby," the story of a determined female boxer played by Hilary Swank, should at last seal his reputation as a heavyweight director.

The movie is not as much about boxing, he says, as it is about the relationship between Swank's character and her ageing trainer, played by Eastwood.

"It's a love story that just happens to take place on the periphery of the boxing world -- a father-daughter love story," he said.

Eastwood made his directorial debut in the 1971 thriller Play Misty for Me, in which he also starred.

He is renowned for his relaxed directorial style and movie trademarks, including the gritty and often dark themes of his films, the working-class backgrounds of his protagonists and a freeze frame after the last scene over which the credits roll.

Eastwood is a relaxed director and never yells the traditional commands "action" and cut." Instead, he just says "OK" to order the cameras to roll and "That's enough of that shit" when he wants them to stop.

But his easygoing approach works: His movies are routinely made at record speed and come in under budget. He shot Baby in just 37 days.

"If you had two seconds to describe how Clint makes a movie, I would say: He sort of waves his hand and a movie gets made," said Mystic River star Sean Penn.

After getting his break as a Hollywood actor in 1954, Eastwood became the world's top box-office draw as the star of westerns and action films such as 1968's Where Eagles Dare and 1970's Kelly's Heroes, and by playing ruthless police Inspector Harry Callahan in 1971's Dirty Harry.

He was born a steelworker's son in San Francisco in May 1930, at the start of the Great Depression, and after graduation, he fought forest fires and worked at a lumber mill before being drafted into the army in 1951.

Eastwood has seven children by five different women and lives in Carmel, a California coastal town where he served as mayor during a two-year political career that began when he won a 1986 election by a landslide.

Eastwood lives with his second wife, television journalist Dina Ruiz, with whom he has an eight-year-old daughter.