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SOndra Locke didn't like to tell people what year she was born. It took six weeks for the news of the American actress and director's death in 2018 to become news, so maybe she wanted to keep it a secret too. She had an air about her. Unusual, enigmatic and neither, Locke could look pale and boyish or strikingly ultra-feminine; old and ageless; resolutely human or like she'd arrived on Earth from the far reaches of space. She was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century cinema. You may never have heard of her name.
In 1969, Locke was nominated for an Academy Award for his first film, an adaptation of a forgotten Carson McCullers novel. The heart is a lonely hunterShe then starred as one of the first transgender characters in American film history in the provocative psychological thriller. Reflection of fearThis sudden change of direction reflected his taste for rock music, his disinterest in the Hollywood industry, and his unconventional approach to life and love.
By the way, she was happily married to a gay man for over 50 years, 13 of those years living with her most prolific film partner, Clint Eastwood. This romance helped, hindered and cruelly defined her career; one US magazine described her in the headline of her obituary as little more than Eastwood's “resentful ex-lover.” She also grabbed a seat at the boys' club of '80s filmmaking, making films herself, the kind of films that, for better or worse, no one dared make.
Eventually, people found out Locke's age: she shaved a few years off for the role. Lone Hunterand continued the jig. Rock's 80th birthday was on May 28th. It could have passed without much fuss. But what if it hadn't?
Locke joins a long lineage of female creatives, including the late screenwriter Diane Thomas and producer, writer, and art director Polly Platt, who infiltrated the American film studio system in the '70s and '80s before fading into relative obscurity. But there were unique circumstances to Locke's disappearance. As a movie star, she had influence in the industry like no other female filmmaker has. But she had a very famous boyfriend in Eastwood, and when that relationship fell apart, she found it impossible to step out of his shadow.
Locke had a delicate, seductive strength in his acting that could seem fragile or sinister depending on the role. The heart is a lonely hunter and Reflection of fearIn The 1968 (1968) and The 1972 film The 1968, she played a bored outsider and a naturally cheerful teenager who is unusually strengthened by life. Death GameIn “The Revenge,” made in 1974 and released in 1977, Locke is one of a pair of psychopathic women who take a man hostage when he turns up on their doorstep, and she's breathtakingly wide-eyed, voluptuous and erotically charged. But in the 1971 film, “The Revenge,” she's much less entertaining. WillardIn it, she plays a third party to a boy and his army of mouse friends (yes, mice again!). Unfortunately, this is likely her most famous film not starring Eastwood.
I had a life before Clint and I'll have a life after Clint.
If none of these films catapulted Rock to the top of the charts, it might have been bad timing. It seems significant that her career seemed to stagnate with the arrival of Sissy Spacek, who also had a vulnerable, alien beauty but was fortunate enough to get her break in far superior films. “I learned pretty quickly that whether you're the best fit for a role, whether you're talented, it doesn't really matter that much,” Rock once said. “It's a matter of coincidence that you can't explain.”
Eastwood came at a time when Locke's career was in the doldrums: Desperate for a break, she took a pay cut to play the female lead in his revisionist westerns. The Outlaw Georgie Wales 1975. Like many of Eastwood's leading ladies, Locke's characters are edgy and sassy but doomed: Sure, she ends up eloping with the hero, but only after being brutalized first; so brutally, in four of the six films she co-starred with him, her characters are gang-raped or nearly gang-raped.
She wrote in her 1997 memoir: The good, the bad and the very ugly She and Eastwood were instantly smitten with each other. It didn't matter that they were both in relationships with other people: Locke was in a platonic marriage to his gay best friend, who he'd known since his teenage years, while Eastwood was married to a woman he didn't live with and barely saw. However unconventional, it worked.
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On screen, Locke plays Eastwood's orangutan counterpart in the brooding Loosely in every way He appeared in Star Wars and its sequels, but outside of that he played increasingly strong and complex characters. GauntletIn 1977's Harry Callahan, she reveled in her wry charm as a fugitive gangster's mistress, while in Eastwood's penultimate Harry Callahan film she plays the vengeful villain. Sudden Impact1983. But their collaboration kept her trapped. “If you're in a Clint Eastwood movie, you're in the Clint Eastwood movie industry,” Locke said in 1997. “It's not part of Hollywood. This became clear early on. People stopped calling. They automatically assumed I was only working with Clint.”
The tension only grew worse over time: “When you're with Clint, you get in a rut… When you're together a long time, you get in a rut, and everybody wants the new guy,” she said in 1983. “To get out of that rut, you have to have your own ideas, your own projects.”
This project Rat Boy“The Man Who Was a Murderer” is a bizarre Hollywood satire about a lonely window dresser who tries to make a lucrative business out of a half-rat, half-human being he stumbles across in a garbage dump. It's ambitious but spectacularly botched. E.T. meet Beautiful womanThe screenplay reflects Locke's personal frustrations and sharp observations about celebrities and outsiders, but there's also a lot of confusion: “What was the point?” critic Roger Ebert asked in his review of the film.Rat Boy Very strange, but not in a funny way,” Locke later said. The film was misconstrued by its backers at Warner Bros. and cut to pieces in the editing room.
Meanwhile, Locke and Eastwood didn't get along well – Eastwood is a quiet man who many say has a lot in common with the elusive drifter who made him a star – so imagine dating him. Independent In 1997, he starred in the film as a man who, rather than ending a relationship, either professionally or romantically, quietly walks away from it until the other person notices. Rat Boy follow up ImpulseIn “The Great Gatsby,” a better movie in which Theresa Russell plays a crazed undercover cop, Eastwood calls her and tells her he wants her out of their Bel Air home. Locke is confused and begs him to reconsider. He agrees, and the breakup talks begin. Impulse It had already been packed, but the next time Locke returned home she found the locks had been changed and her belongings in storage.
“If he didn't love me, he had every right to end the relationship,” Locke said. Independentin the same Eastwood interview. “But he has no right to treat me like that. There's a line between you and Clint. He has every right, and you have none.” Eastwood, meanwhile, said he ended the relationship because Locke had married his friend Gordon Anderson. “She spent 98 to 100 percent of her time pampering him,” he claimed. “I got tired of it. At a certain point, I was like, 'I want a normal relationship in my life. I want a girlfriend.'”
An extraordinary year-long legal battle ensued, with Locke fighting Eastwood for marital benefits, even though they were both legally married to other people. Locke accused Eastwood of abuse, claiming that she had been ordered to have two abortions and to be sterilized, which Eastwood “categorically denied”, and maintained that Locke's allegations were “baseless and without merit”. In her own testimony, Eastwood only referred to Locke as an “occasional roommate”. Eventually, exhausted by her treatments for breast cancer, Locke settled by taking over ownership of the house Eastwood had bought her, her unpaid earnings of $450,000 (£251,000 at the time) from Eastwood's production company, and signing a producing and directing deal with Warner Bros. at her request.
Locke initially claimed victory, but later alleged that her Warner deal was a sham. She was paid $1.5 million and had an office on the studio premises, but more than 30 projects she brought to Warner were rejected. She then found out that the $1.5 million had been secretly paid by Eastwood, not Warner Brothers, and sued him for fraud. Eastwood maintained that his intentions were pure and that he had funded the deal to help Locke. She claimed it was a deceptive power play designed to keep her at the studio and out of work.
The case went to trial in 1996, with Eastwood accusing Locke of using his cancer diagnosis to gain the jury's sympathy and claiming the suit was a racketeering racket. They eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but both sides claimed to have won. While promoting his book in 1997, Locke said “Who is he?” [Eastwood] “I'm like, Oh my God, I've lost so much time,” she said. The book was an attempt to get her story across and dispel her image as a gold-digger. “I had a life before I met Clint and I intend to have a life after,” she said.
Locke's career never recovered, and in 2013 she said she believed she had been blacklisted because of her legal battles. [Clint’s] “The downside,” she said Wandrin Star“Why bother? Why get involved? I always believed I had a lot of fans in high places, but they didn't want to put themselves at risk. That's just the way it is in Hollywood.”
Little is known about Locke's life after that. She remained married to Anderson and starred in the indie romantic comedy ” Ray and Helen meetreleased in 2017, but otherwise there was no word from her. She was not included in the “In Memoriam” category at the 2019 Academy Awards, and Eastwood has not commented publicly on her death from osteosarcoma. It is unclear whether they have since spoken. Curiously, however, Eastwood's 2018 film Mules In the film, Locke's character reunites with his ex-wife, whom he rejected and abused, to seek redemption as she dies of cancer. The film was released in theaters the day after Locke's death was announced.
Locke's name occasionally pops up in articles about the history of women in Hollywood. Many media outlets reexamined the Eastwood-Locke feud during Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's high-profile feud, which bears a passing resemblance. But her actual body of work, no matter how unorthodox, is also worth reexamining. Locke was unique, unorthodox, brilliant, a woman born for a Hollywood that didn't exist when she got there. But even if it hurt her, it never broke her.
“Overall, I'm happy with myself,” she said in an interview in 2013. “I feel like I've overcome the challenges that have been presented to me with more of a positive attitude than most.”
