Clint Eastwood’s most famous co-star is probably Sondra Locke, with whom he began a fifteen year relationship after the two met on the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Locke and Eastwood started off their relationship with the usual amount of love and passion, but the joyous union ended badly when Sondra discovered that Clint had been having a secret affair for a number of years with another woman with whom he had fathered two children. On top of the understandable pain of finding out that her long-time boyfriend had been cheating on her, Sondra claimed that she had had two abortions over the course of their relationship because Clint said that he didn’t want any more children.
The couple’s break-up was made even more complicated because Clint owned the house in which Sondra had been living and had promised to promote her career with a three-movie development deal at Warner Brothers. In exchange for Clint’s promise to proceed with the deal, Sondra dropped a palimony lawsuit she had brought against him. Unfortunately, despite giving her a 1.5 million advance and an office, Warner Brothers ultimately rejected all of her films. Sondra sued Clint for fraud in 1996. The pair settled out of court. Looking back on the relationship, Sondra said that she felt her promising career (she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter in 1968) had been ruined by her involvement with a much older, much more famous man. She died of a heart attack connected to breast cancer and bone cancer at the age of 74 in 2018.