California is a rum old place. Nice climate, great frozen yoghurt, but really: where else could we be treated to the spectacle of two Hollywood stars, with government jobs, bickering over a plan to build a motorway across a beach? But apparently, as a result of this disagreement, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 60-year-old Governor of the state, has just dismissed his friend Clint Eastwood, 77, from his job as California state parks commissioner.

Eastwood, as one might expect from even a cursory knowledge of his film career, is taking it on the chin. “I'm a grown person. I'm not a kid,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It's not like I need a day job.”

The same could be said of Schwarzenegger, but we'll let that lie. For his part, Eastwood, who served as mayor of his home town of Carmel, California, in the 1980s, is now said to be planning a return as Dirty Harry, more than 30 years after he first starred as the maverick cop with genius one-liners. He has parlayed an acting career as a monosyllabic hard man into a second career behind the camera and is now one of the most prolific and acclaimed directors in Hollywood: he won Oscars for best director and best picture with Unforgiven in 1993 and Million Dollar Baby in 2005.

His career began in 1959 with Rawhide, a television western, and he made the tricky leap to the big screen in Sergio Leone's iconic spaghetti westerns. The personification of the “less is more” school of acting, Eastwood's CV is pretty much a roll call of greats: For a Few Dollars More, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Where Eagles Dare, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And he's the real deal, a 6ft 4in tough guy who held down jobs fuelling furnaces, chopping down trees and as a private in the US Army while he waited for his big break. Women may lust after George Clooney, but most men want to be Clint.

Now, he says, he is a different person from the man whose acting was synonymous with blood and violence. In part, this is down to the influence of his wife, Dina Ruiz, a former TV journalist 35 years his junior, who represented the end of a prev-ious life of beer and babes during which he fathered seven children by five different women and endured a messy break-up with his long-term partner, Sondra Locke.

“In the stories I have done latterly, I have tried to deal with violence seriously,” he said recently. “I feel that, if you are going to make a film about violence, you have to make a statement that violence is not fun and games; it is not comedic.”

Yet, as the spat with Schwarzenegger shows, behind the hard-man image lies a pithy sense of humour. When he was sworn in to the parks commissioner job he waved his badge at the watching crowd and said: “You're all under arrest.”

Clint is, quite simply, what Arnie will never be: cool (and tall). Maybe it rankles.

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