Ol' Beedy Eyes
For awhile there, Lee Van Cleef considered
giving up acting.
"I did better as an actor than I would have
as an accountant," he said, "but this face of mine and these beedy
eyes confined me to small roles playing heavies that few
people remembered (in 'High Noon,' 'The Bravados,' 'Tribute To A
Badman,' 'Lawless Breed,' 'Gunfight At The OK Corral,' and many
other pictures)."
Until director Sergio Leone personally
tracked down Van Cleef and offered him the role of bounty hunter
Colonel Douglas Mortimer in the stylish western, "For a Few Dollars
More."
Leone's "The Good, The Bad. and The Ugly" was
the icing on the cake and Van Cleef found he was a much talked about
super-star of stylish westerns and every young movie-goer's idea of
the coolest hombre around.
"Most of those westerns were pretty good, I
think, but there were a couple I didn't care for," he said. "We
won't talk about them."
He was smoking Colonel Mortimer's Sherlock
pipe when we met. There was a trick to it, he said:
"You have to press the tobacco into the bowl
a certain way and just right in order to draw through it. It
really requires a special touch."
The Van Cleef touch.