MAKE MY BIRTHDAY ...I'M 70 YEARS OLD; Don't expect Dirty Harry to be the retiring type, even if Clint Eastwood is in his eighth decade - he's not yet ready to ride off into the sunset.

CLINT EASTWOOD may have turned 70 today, but mention retirement and that leathery Dirty Harry grimace returns.

"What else could I do?" he says with a hint of mock indignation. "I'm not the retiring type. I think I'm the sort of person who'll always work."

The face certainly appears more weather-beaten and wrinkled and the hair is thinning but Clint Eastwood believes that, despite his advancing years, he can still be a hot property in Hollywood.

The inevitability of growing older certainly doesn't trouble the legendary actor who is happier than ever in his colourful personal life and can now pick and choose his professional projects.

He says: "I don't know what a person does if they don't carry on with what they love doing."

For the first time, it seems, Clint is totally content with his love life. He is happily married to newscaster Dina Ruiz, 34, and they have a three-year-old daughter, Morgan.

In his distinguished career, Clint has made 41 movies and directed 21 including Unforgiven in 1992 which won him best picture and best director Oscars.

And he is comforted in the knowledge that, having made his name and his millions no-one, not even the barbs of the critics, can bother him now.

He said: "As a friend of mine said the other day, there's one great thing to being in your seventies. What can they do to you?"

Hopefully, he still has a lot of living on both sides of the camera. His father died suddenly at the age of 63, but his paternal grandfather lived to 97.

Having generated almost $1billion in box-office business, Clint Eastwood is one of a select band of A-list actors who is also an A-list director.

His films include some of the undisputed greats of the past three decades including The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, Pale Rider, Dirty Harry, Unforgiven and In The Line of Fire.

But he reached the pinnacle of his profession when he proudly stepped up to receive his Academy awards for Unforgiven.

Admittedly his career has cooled since then. But Clint refuses to view getting older with any negativity.

"Take Cary Grant," he says, referring to the late, English-born Hollywood heart-throb. "At some point he felt he had to retire. He felt nobody would want to watch him on screen. So he quit. He was such a great-looking man in his senior years, but for some reason he just lost interest.

"For me, the age is irrelevant. I've always looked for work that is character driven, and if those characters get a little older, well so am I."

Clint refuses to dwell on past mistakes and insists he is "a today person".

"Life is a constant lesson," he says with that statesmanlike wisdom. "Sometimes you learn it better than at other times. If you dwell on your old mistakes, you don't have time to avoid new ones."

Of all the older 20th century movie stars who are now of pensionable age, Clint Eastwood is one who could justifiably be called an icon.

He has been hailed as the second top movie cowboy of all time -eclipsed only by The Duke himself, John Wayne.

But he is not particularly flattered by the enduring adulation.

He says: "After you've been around for 40 years, people think, 'well, he won't go away. So I guess we'll call him something'. I may be old, but I hope I am not predictable.

"I'd like for my epitaph to read: 'He kept surprising them.'"

Clint began his career more than 40 years ago as the dashing cowboy Rowdy Yates in the TV series Rawhide. He made the transition from television to film with a trio of atmospheric spaghetti westerns - Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.

Clint was the Man With No Name and created a macho image that he has kept right up until his most recent film, True Crime.

In 1970, he added a distinguished director's feather to his cap when he went behind the cameras for Play Misty For Me. He has since directed westerns, comedies, thrillers, war pictures and romances.

Retirement rumours began when the veteran actor made the decision to take a year off following The Bridges Of Madison County, in which he showed his sensitive side opposite Meryl Streep.

Then, in the throes of his romance with Dina, he wanted to take time to make sure he'd met the right woman before making her his second bride in March, 1996.

She admits that when she met Clint, her dream was for him to fall in love with her mum and sweep the old lady off her feet.

Dina, who is 36 years younger than the grizzled actor, says: "I'd seen him throughout the years with really pretty, blondish, reddy-haired women. My mum matched the bill.

"Then, when I interviewed Clint, I took the tapes back to the television station. We were editing it in front of two other woman, the executive producer and my news editor and they said, 'You're gonna marry him'." Indeed, not only does Dina appear in Clint's latest film, there are also roles for his ex-mistress Frances Fisher and their six-year-old love child, Francesca Ruth Fisher Eastwood.

Clint's first marriage to former swimsuit model Maggie Johnson produced jazz musician Kyle, 31, and actress Alison, 27; a 14-year affair with Roxanne Tunis, an actress he met on the set of Rawhide, resulted in actress daughter Kimber, 36, while along the way he fathered Scott, 13, and Kathryn, 11, with actress Jacelyn Reeves.

The actor says Dina is the love of his life and this marriage is for keeps. They have been together for four years.

He says: "I didn't think I'd ever get married again. I'd been single a long time. I thought I was too used to it to get married again.

"But I found the woman I was nuts about. Don't call her my second wife - she's my last wife."

Clint has remained on reasonably cordial terms with the various mothers of his seven children.

Ironically, it was his childless union with actress Sondra Locke which created the most friction.

She sued him for palimony after their 12-year relationship ended and recently published a bitter kiss-and-tell book, entitled The Good, The Bad and The Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey.

"In choosing our relationship partners, we all make mistakes. That was my big mistake," Clint says. "I have no intentions of reading Sondra's book. It's obviously just a rehash of everything she fed to the supermarket publications in the past.

"Sondra is a professional victim. It's the role she relishes most. I don't think people are going to be that interested in her book. If they are, I just wish they'd do their research."The insanity behind it all started long before me, but I have to take full responsibility for getting myself into that relationship and staying there for so long."

Clint has property in Los Angeles, Sun Valley, Idaho and his sprawling ranch in northern California.

But the Eastwoods live in the picturesque Californian ocean-side town of Carmel, where he was mayor for a term beginning in 1987.

Clint Eastwood didn't follow another actor, Ronald Reagan, and try to be President - and he's glad that he didn't have to face the muck-raking by the Press that Bill Clinton had to endure.

"I never had the ambition to go further. They'd crucify me," he says. "The Press are always trying to dig up stuff."

In celebrating his 70th birthday today, he will mark the next phase of his illustrious career by directing two new movies - sci-fi thriller Space Cowboys co- starring Tommy Lee Jones, James Cromwell, James Garner and Donald Sutherland, and Listening With The Eyes, co-starring with Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, Dennis Hopper and Bill Cosby.

He may be getting older but it's hardly surprising Clint Eastwood still feels lucky.

A FISTFUL OF MOVIES

ROWDY STRANGER: Fresh from the Army and persuaded by fellow-squaddies that he could act, by 1959, Clint was Rowdy Yates in the TV Western series Rawhide - but it took nine years and a move to Europe to create, not so much a crossroads in his career, as a cowboy hero

MAN WITH NO NAME: But all that was to change in 1965, when he and Sergio Leone created the unshaven, squinting hero of A Fistful Of Dollars. A few Dollars More and what is probably the all-time classic spaghetti western, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, were made back-to-back in 1966

DO YOU FEEL LUCKY, PUNK?: Not until 1971, he didn't, after having had to sing in Paint Your Wagon. But Dirty Harry and the four spin-offs turned Clint's character, Harry Callahan, and the "most powerful handgun in the world" into movie icons

CLYDE SLIDE: The late Eighties found another slump in Clint's career, including The Rookie, Pink Cadillac and Every Which Way But Loose, in which he starred with an orang-utan

FORGIVEN AGAIN: In 1992, Clint bounced back in Unforgiven, the Oscar-laden film which

managed to rekindle the Western