Clint Eastwood was catapulted to film stardom when he played a brooding gunslinger in Sergio Leone’s first Spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars. In a 1977 interview with the BBC, the Italian director confessed that he “really wanted” another actor for the now iconic role.
Source: ‘To me Clint closely resembled a cat’: Sergio Leone on the role that made Eastwood a movie star