The actress and director Sondra Locke became known for a series of hit movies in the 1970s and '80s, but her big break actually happened much earlier. She made her debut in Robert Ellis Miller's 1967 film adaptation of Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, having won an America-wide talent search for the role of Margaret "Mick" Kelly. Starring opposite Alan Arkin, she was immediately nominated for a string of awards, including Oscars and Golden Globes, in categories ranging from Best Supporting Actress to Most Promising Newcomer.
Born Sandra Louise Smith in 1944, she became Locke when her mother remarried in 1948, and changed the spelling of Sandra in her 20s to ward off being nicknamed "Sandy". Growing up in Tennessee, she was a popular and successful student at Shelbyville High School, and went on to land a job in the promotional department at Nashville's WSM-TV, while also modelling on the side for the fashion pages of newspaper The Tennessean.
She followed the whirlwind of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter with more films – drama Cover Me Babe with Robert Forster; thriller A Reflection Of Fear with Robert Shaw; the hit 1971 horror Willard – before becoming a TV regular, with roles in the likes of Kung-Fu and Planet Of The Apes among many others.
But it was her professional and personal relationship with Clint Eastwood that would come to define her subsequent life and career. Beginning with the classic Western The Outlaw Josey Wales in 1976, she went on to co-star with Eastwood in the actioner The Gauntlet, the redneck ape comedies Every Which Way But Loose and its sequel Any Which Way You Can, the family dramedy Bronco Billy, and the fourth in the Dirty Harry series, Sudden Impact. In between Eastwoods she also found time for TV movies like The Rosemary Clooney Story, and the low-budget horror Death Game. She disowned the latter, but retained an executive producer credit on Eli Roth's remake, Knock Knock, in 2015.
Infamously, Locke's relationship with the controlling Eastwood finally ended in acrimony in 1989. Her directorial debut, the drama Ratboy produced under Eastwood's Malpaso banner, was essentially buried by studio Warner Brothers, and her subsequent output slowed. But she didn't take the situation without a fight, firing multiple lawsuits at Eastwood and Warners for essentially conspiring to sabotage her career. All were settled out of court in Locke's favour for undisclosed but clearly huge sums. Locke titled her 1997 autobiography The Good, the Bad and the Very Ugly.
After a long illness she survived breast cancer in 1990, and went on to direct three further films: Impulse (1990), Death In Small Doses (1995), and Do Me A Favor (1997). She made her final appearance in front of the camera in 2017, with a role in Alan Rudolph's romantic drama Ray Meets Helen.
She died from recurrent breast and bone cancers in early November, 2018, although for reasons unclear this has only now been publicly announced. She is survived by her husband, the sculptor Gordon Leigh Anderson, who she married in 1967, and with whom she remained close throughout everything. She is buried at the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.
Keep up to date with all the latest movie news, click here to subscribe to Empire on Great Magazines and have the latest issue delivered to your door every month.