All The A-Listers Want To Do Is... Rule!
Why play a president or prime minister on screen when you can hold office for real?
Clint Eastwood
Qualifications For The Job: You’re joking? This is the same Clint Eastwood who’d ridden roughshod over Gian Maria Volonte in the Dollars movies, iced psychopaths as Dirty Harry Callahan, and, crucially, formed an effective on-screen partnership with an orang-utan.
The Campaign: Long rumoured to have been interested in running for high office, Clint ended up contesting mayoral elections in the Californian coastal town of Carmel. Key policies? Allowing ice-cream to be eaten in the street, and approving an extentension for a restaurant owned by one C. Eastwood.
Press Reaction: Come on! One of the world’s biggest stars throws his hat into the political ring. Had the press hugged themselves any harder, they’d have suffocated.
Redeeming Features: You can see from his policies that politics wasn’t Clint’s principal motivation. Still, running for office did at least stop him making tat like The Dead Pool and Pink Cadillac for a while.
Subsequent Career: After one term of restaurant-extending and ice-cream enabling, Eastwood quit his post. Since then, the nearest he’s got to the big chair was interviewing an invisible Obama at the 2012 Republican Convention.
Glenda Jackson
Qualifications For The Job: Jackson’s Oscar-winning work in A Touch Of Class and Women In Love suggested she had some fine parliamentary performences in her. Skits with Morecambe and Wise, meanwhile, proved that she had that key policitcal asset:
a sense of humour.
The Campaign: Jackson ran for Labour in the 1992 election in leafy Hampdstead. That said, the area really has gone downhill of late. They’ve even got a McDonald’s these days…
Press Reaction: Positive, since Glenda’s previous artistic success and slightly frightening demeanour provided the papers with countless, unfunny headline opportunities.
Redeeming Features: Plenty. She seemed genuinely interested in her constituents, campaigned to preserve London Transport, and proved all too ready to laugh at herself during her semi-regular appearances on Have I Got News For You?
Subsequent Career: Elected in 1992, Jackson retained her seat until leaving the Commons in 2015, swapping the political stage for Broadway and the West End.
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