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Lighting up the screen for over half a century, Clint Eastwood’s characters have become synonymous with cigars

Cigars and the movies have a long, smoky history. Would it be quite so easy to conjure up, in the mind’s eye, an image of Groucho Marx were it not for his oversized, permanently dangling cigar? And somehow, Tony Montana in Scarface, seems an incomplete character without his cigar permanently attached to his menacing persona. Michael Douglas in Wall Street wields his expensive cigar as a signifier of his wealth and success as much as the gold Rolex strapped to his wrist. Hollywood ascribes cigar smoking to its rebels, outliers, baddies and criminals – funny when you think that today, society tends to relegate the cigar to the echelons of successful, established living. A fine cigar is reassuring everywhere, except, it seems, on the silver screen.

One actor whose on-screen puffing has become almost synonymous with an entire genre is Clint Eastwood. The hard-living outsider on the edge of society, the Wild West cowboy, frowning into the long distance with a thousand-yard stare. So it’s ironic to think that most of the cigars smoked by Eastwood, an icon of Hollywood’s golden age and beyond, were probably relatively modest cheroots. In A Fistful of Dollars (1964) the little cigar was established as his trademark. In High Plains Drifter (1973)  the mysterious stranger even takes his stogie into the bath with him, presumably so it doesn’t get stolen by the town ruffians. Eastwood became adept at using his cigar as part of his acting, pausing, holding it for dramatic effect and taking a taciturn puff when confronted with a nemesis. It’s perhaps why he’s one of our favourite fictional cigar smokers, although fans of the actor will know that the Academy Award winner, prolific director and accomplished pianist who once played Carnegie Hall, is an avowed non-smoker.