Roberta Flack recorded "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" for her 1969 debut album First Take
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Clint Eastwood made his directorial debut with the 1971 film Play Misty for Me
"The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" hit No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 and won the Grammy for record of the year
If it weren't forClint Eastwood,Roberta Flackmight not have become one of the biggest pop stars on the planet in the early 1970s. But before they could create the perfect marriage of music and movie, Flack had to get out of her own way.
In the documentaryOWN Spotlight: Roberta, airing March 12 on the OWN network, both Eastwood and Flack, via archival audio recordings, discuss the song that made her a superstar: the 1971 hit "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Originally recorded for Flack's 1969 debut albumFirst Take, the torch ballad became a slow-burn sensation when Eastwood used it in his 1971 directorial debutPlay Misty for Me.
"The song was out there and had been out there, and every now and then you'd hear it on the radio," Flack, who died in 2025 at age 88, says inRoberta. "But it did not have the wide acceptance until people could associate something visual with it."
Enter Eastwood, who at the time was best known for starring in the western TV seriesRawhidefrom 1959 to 1965 and appearing in Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns like 1966'sThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He was in the process of directing a feature film for the first time. The project,Play Misty for Me, starring Eastwood, Donna Mills and Jessica Walter, was a romantic-thriller prototype forFatal Attraction, right down to itsMadame Butterflyreference and unsuccessful suicide attempt.
"I wanted to do a nice idyllic scene where [my character] was sort of reconciling with the girlfriend, Donna Mills' character," Eastwood recalls via an audio recording in the documentary. "I heard the Roberta Flack song on the radio coming to work one day, and I said, 'Oh yeah, this tells the story.' "
With $1,000 to spend on securing the rights to use Flack's recording in his movie, he set about getting her permission.
"He called me in Virginia," Flack recalls. "That was a bit thrill for my mom. And we talked, and he said he wanted to use it, and I said, 'No.' "
In 1971, of course, Eastwood, like Flack, didn't yet have the clout or the reputation he would eventually achieve. "Yes" wasn't a given.
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"By this time I had become a little bit commercially concerned about what people were going to hear," she explains, "and I said, 'It's too long. I'd like to, you know, to do it again.' He said, 'No, I'd like to use it.' So I said, 'We'll take the first eight or 16 bars out. You don't need that piano intro.' He said, 'I want every note, every breath.' "
"The story is that he was driving down the Los Angeles freeway, and he heard the song. He said the song just totally hypnotized him," Flack continues. "And he found himself driving off the side of the freeway."
The movie, released in October of 1971, was a hit, and it sent "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" into the stratosphere. Flack's recording of the song — which was written in the 1950s by Ewan MacColl for his future wife, folk singer Peggy Seeger, who recorded it in 1962 — belatedly went to No. 1 onBillboard's Hot 100 for six weeks and won a Grammy for record of the year.
Flack would go on to score landmark hits with 1973's "Killing Me Softly with His Song" and 1975's "Feel Like Makin' Love," both of which went to No. 1 onBillboard's Hot 100, but her 1972 single "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" was the one that made the former schoolteacher a pop star when she was already in her mid 30s.
Over the decades, the ballad has become a romantic standard, recorded by artists likeCeline DionandElvis Presley, but as Flack told PEOPLE in 2022, romance was the furthest thing from her mind when she recorded her version.
"Through the years, I've sung that song thousands of times, and it has taken on different stories in my life, [but] honestly, at the time it was recorded, I sang it about my cat who had just died," Flack recalled. "I loved that cat so much. That's the story I was telling in the recording."
OWN Spotlight: Robertawill air on OWN March 12 at 9 p.m. ET.
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