John Wayne, American actor
Marion Morrison was the son of an Iowa pharmacist; he acquired the nickname “Duke” during his youth and billed himself as Duke Morrison for one of his early films.
In 1925 he enrolled at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), where he played football. He worked summers at the Fox Film Corporation as a propman and developed a friendship with director John Ford, who cast him in some small film roles starting in 1928.
His first leading role—and his first appearance as “John Wayne”—came in director Raoul Walsh’ The Big Trail (1930). During the next eight years Wayne starred in more than 60 low-budget motion pictures, mostly in roles as cowboys, soldiers, and other rugged men of adventure.
He reached genuine star stature when Ford cast him as the Ringo Kid in the western Stagecoach (1939).
After that film his place in American cinema was established and grew with each successive year. Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940), a film based on several O’Neal one-act plays, featured one of Wayne’s most praised performances from the early years of his stardom and offered further evidence of his commanding screen presence.
Evidence suggests that his attempts to enlist in the Navy, were rejected because of his age, an old football injury, and a federal government directive to draft boards to go easy on actors whose talents could be used for building morale. He spent the war years entertaining troops overseas and making films such as the popular action-adventures Flying Tigers (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1944), They Were Expendable (1945), and Back to Bataan (1945), all of which featured Wayne as quintessentially American fighting men who overcome great odds. He also appeared during this period in melodramas such as The Spoilers (1942) and Flame of Barbary Coast (1945). By the end of the war, Wayne was firmly established as one of Hollywood’s top stars.
Wayne’s screen image was permanently defined in the many classic films he made with directors Ford and Hawks during the postwar years and into the early 1960s. For Ford, Wayne starred in what has come to be known as the “Cavalry Trilogy”: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), three elegiac films in which Wayne portrays stoic cavalry officers of the Old West.
Wayne’s roles in these and other films for Ford offer a somewhat complex representation of the American character in that they exhibit unflagging patriotism but are disillusioned by, and resigned to, the inherent hypocrisies within America.
In this manner the Ford-Wayne films both honor and undermine the mythology of the Old West, nowhere more so than in The Searchers (1956), a film considered by some to be the greatest western ever made. Wayne’s character in this film pursues a noble goal (rescuing his kidnapped niece from a renegade Comanche leader), but his obsessive behavior and blatant bigotry reveal him to be as mad as he is heroic.
Hawks’s collaborations with Wayne are less iconoclastic than Ford’s, but no less revered. Red River (1948), another candidate for the greatest western of all time, features Wayne as an autocratic, monomaniacal cattle baron at odds with the orphan boy he has reared (portrayed in adulthood by Monty Clift in his first screen role) and the modern values he represents.
Wayne did not work with Hawks again until Rio Bravo (1959), a film born of Hawks’s and Wayne’s dissatisfaction with the popularity of High Noon (1952), the Gary Cooper western in which citizens of a western community are portrayed as weak-willed and cowardly when their sheriff asks their help in forming a posse. The sheriff portrayed by Wayne in Rio Bravo, conversely, is determined to do his duty with or without help from anyone. Although greeted with lukewarm reviews upon its release, Rio Bravo is now regarded as a classic western.
Hawks and Wayne remade essentially the same story twice, in El Dorado (1967) and in Rio Lobo (1970), Hawks’s final film.
Wayne’s good films for other directors include Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in which his performance as uncompromisingly tough Marine sergeant earned Oscar nomination; Hondo (1953), perhaps the only classic western filmed in 3-D; The Alamo (1960), an epic-length film that Wayne himself directed and in which he starred as Davy Crockett; The Longest Day (1962) and In Harm’s Way (1965), two hugely successful World War II epics; and McLintock! (1963), a slapstick western farce that was his only successful comedy.
After screen career of more than 40 years, Wayne was honored with Oscar Award for his portrayal of the drunken, cantankerous, but endearing U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969), a role he reprised opposite Katharine Hepburn in Rooster Cogburn (1975), a partial remake of the Hepburn–Humphrey Bogart classic The African Queen (1951).
Wayne’s final film, The Shootist (1976), in which he portrays an aging gunfighter who is dying of cancer, was praised by many as his best western since Rio Bravo. This role was a poignant screen farewell for an actor who himself would succumb to cancer three years later.
Wayne endured criticism throughout his career from those who questioned his versatility as an actor. His ability to convey quiet tenderness, however, and his capacity for multilayered portrayals of complex characters, as in Red River and The Searchers, was often overlooked. Wayne himself was also the subject of controversy: his outspoken right-wing politics were admired by conservatives but derided by liberals as being naively jingoistic. His politics notwithstanding, he is considered a towering cinematic icon and the greatest Hollywood star of all time.
He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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Howard Hawks: Films of the 1940s…chemistry between two actors—this time John Wayne and (in his first screen role) Montgomery Clift—that fueled the powerful epic western Red River (1948). Wayne and Clift played a father and his adopted son who are leading a cattle drive, and the Oedipal interplay between them had overtones of Frank Lloyd’s… -
Raoul Walsh: Films of the 1930s…a western epic with young John Wayne in his first starring role as the head of a wagon train on the Oregon Trail and was filmed in an early widescreen process. - Western:
- The singing cowboy, first made popular by Gene Autry and later by Tex Ritter and Roy Rogers, was an odd accoutrement of some of the westerns of the late 1930s and the ’40s and ’50s.…
