Marcel Thomas (1909-2000) - portrait de CLint Eastwood - cachet de l'expert Gérard Gagnepain au verso

A very beautiful photograph of Clint Eastwood (born in 1930), an American actor, director, and producer, who became famous thanks to Sergio Leone's Westerns and his role as Inspector Harry. He is also a major director, the author of films such as Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and Gran Torino.

Marcel Thomas is a French photographer with an atypical career. It was after World War II that he settled in Paris, working in garment manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, thanks to the help of porter friends in the great Parisian hotels, he photographed, with their consent, hundreds of French and international stars. He would approach them with a friend who asked for an autograph, then would propose that his companion take the photos of them; hence the "posed" rather than "stolen" aspect of them.

Marcel Thomas took these photos as an amateur and did not commercialize them, but he accumulated several thousand. Shortly before his death in August 2000, he bequeathed his photos to his friend, the author Gérard Gagnepain, whom he charged with making his collection known.