Long before Clint Eastwood took up resident at Warner Bros. — he’s been there for 35 years — Jack Warner himself renamed one of his young contract actors Clint.

“Henry Willson had renamed me Jet Norman,” said the former Norman Walker, now 83, on the phone, referring to the legendary agent who also introduced Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue to the world. “Jack Warner said, ‘We’d like to change your name to Clint,’ and I said, ‘that’s fine if it’s Clint Walker.’ I’ll always be grateful to him for that.”

Not that Clint Walker and Jack Warner didn’t have their disagreements. Walker became a huge star in the Warners TV series “Cheyenne,” but Warner intially resisted putting the actor, who was shooting 26 one-hour episodes a year, in his feature films as he had done for “Maverick” star James Garner.

“Making a feature was like making a vacation compared to the series,” said Walker, whose second starring feature, “Yellowstone Kelly,” debuted this week at the manufactured-on-demand Warner Archive Collection. “We shot the shows in six days and there were times when I had a hard time keeping track of what was going on — I was always asking, ‘didn’t I shoot this guy last week?’ ”

Walker was praised as “the biggest, finest-looking Western hero ever to sag a hrose, with a pair of shoulders rivaling King Kong’s” in a New York Times review of his first starring role in “Fort Dobbs,” which Walker says is also coming to DVD one of these days.

“Fort Dobbs” and “Yellowstone Kelly” were both directed by Gordon Douglas and written by Burt Kennedy, genre vets who also worked on Walker’s third Warner western, “Gold of the Seven Saints,” which is also available at the Warner Archive.

He’s particularly proud of his work as an explorer who saves an Indian maiden in “Yellowstone Kelly,” which was loosely based on a real-life person. “I’m living in Grass Valley, Calif., about 25 years from where Yellowstone Kelly moved in 1915.”

The film is filled with Warner contract players, including Edward “Kookie” Brynes — incongruously sporting his ’50s duck-tail haircut from “77 Sunset Strip” in a story set in the 19th century — and “Lawman” star John Russell as a Native American.

Also in redface is Warner player Ray Danton, whose “pants were so tight that when he got on a horse he had to jump up on his belly and swing around. We were shooting some scenes in Flagstaff [Ariz.] and twice when he tried to mount, he went over the horse. A woman started laughing and he just let go at her.”

The 6-foot-6 Walker made his first screen appearance in a brief gag appearance as Tarzan in the Bowery Boys comedy “Jungle Gents” (1954).

“Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey are about to take Jane on a river boat when I show up and say, ‘No take Jane,’ ”he recalls. “I spent a lot of time practicing the Tarzan yell, not realizing that they were planning to dub in a recording.”

Walker’s breakthrough came when actor-producer Henry Willcoxon recommended him to play the captain of the guard in “The Ten Commandments.” “He kind of adopted me and got me into the business,” recalled Walker, who was then placed under contract to Paramount producer Hal B. Wallis.

“But I never did any features for him. Warner bought my contract, and I did a couple of tests for ‘Cheynenne.’ The first was terrible, but I was more relaxed for the second one. I was very lucky because Warner was very quality oriented. Those ‘Cheyennes’ hold up very well; I am still getting fan mails about them on my website 50 years later.”

Despite having the same first names, Walker says he was rarely confused with Eastwood, who started in Hollywood at the same time but whose stardom was longer in come — Eastwood is billed tenth in “Lafayette Escadrille,” which initially played on a double feature with Walker’s starring debut “Fort Dobbs.”

“More often, I was confused with Fess Parker because our voices are so similar,”he says with a laugh, referring to the “Davy Crockett” star. “Clint certainly has done well for himself, but I don’t know that I’d want to work as hard as him at our age. I’m busy enough with the website and appearing at film festivals.”

Would he consider working in a movie again?

“I don’t lose any sleep over it,” he says. “If it was a good script, I’d love to go in front of the camera again. I won’t just do anything — it has to be something I feel good about.”