Marion Robert Morrison (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), professionally known as John Wayne and nicknamed The Duke or Duke Wayne, was an American actor who became a popular icon through his starring roles in films which were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, especially through his starring roles in Western and war movies. His career flourished from the silent era of the 1920s through the American New Wave, as he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions. He was among the top box-office draws for three decades, and he appeared with many other important Hollywood stars of his era. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Wayne as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.
Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, but he grew up in
Southern California. After losing his football scholarship to the University of
Southern California from a bodysurfing accident, he began working for the Fox
Film Corporation. He appeared mostly in small parts, but his first leading role
came in Raoul Walsh's Western The Big Trail (1930), an early widescreen film
epic that was a box-office failure. He played leading roles in numerous B
movies during the 1930s, most of them also Westerns, without becoming a major
name. John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made Wayne a mainstream star, and he
starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, "John Wayne personified for millions
the nation's frontier heritage."
Wayne's other roles in Westerns include a cattleman driving
his herd on the Chisholm Trail in Red River (1948), a Civil War veteran whose
niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in The Searchers (1956), a troubled
rancher competing with a lawyer (James Stewart) for a woman's hand in The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in True
Grit (1969), for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also
remembered for his roles in The Quiet Man (1952) with Maureen O'Hara, Rio Bravo
(1959) with Dean Martin, and The Longest Day (1962). In his final screen
performance, he starred as an aging gunfighter battling cancer in The Shootist
(1976). He made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on
April 9, 1979, and died of stomach cancer two months later. In 1980, he was
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian
honor of the United States.
Early life
Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, at
224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa. The local paper, Winterset
Madisonian, reported on page 4 of the edition of May 30, 1907, that Wayne
weighed 13 lb (around 6 kg) at birth. Wayne claimed his middle name was soon
changed from Robert to Michael when his parents decided to name their next son
Robert, but extensive research has found no such legal change, although it
might have been changed informally or the documentation may have been lost.
Wayne's legal name apparently remained Marion Robert Morrison his entire life
although to this day his original name is almost always referred to as Marion
Michael Morrison.
Wayne's father, Clyde Leonard Morrison (1884–1937), was the
son of American Civil War veteran Marion Mitchell Morrison (1845–1915). Wayne's
mother, the former Mary "Molly"
Alberta Brown (1885–1970), was from Lancaster County, Nebraska. Wayne had
Scottish, Scotch-Irish, English, and Irish ancestry. His
great-great-grandfather Robert Morrison (b. 1782) left County Antrim, Ireland,
with his mother, arriving in New York in 1799 and eventually settling in Adams
County, Ohio. The Morrisons were originally from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer
Hebrides, Scotland. He was raised Presbyterian.
Wayne's family moved to Palmdale, California, and then in
1916 to Glendale at 404 Isabel Street, where his father worked as a pharmacist.
He attended Glendale Union High School, where he performed well in both sports
and academics. Wayne was part of his high school's football team and its
debating team. He was also the president of the Latin Society and contributed
to the school's newspaper sports column.
A local fireman at the station on his route to school in
Glendale started calling him "Little
Duke" because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier,
Duke. He preferred "Duke"
to "Marion", and the
nickname stuck. Wayne attended Wilson Middle School in Glendale. As a teen, he
worked in an ice-cream shop for a man who shod horses for Hollywood studios. He
was also active as a member of the Order of DeMolay. He played football for the
1924 league champion Glendale High School team.
Wayne applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not
accepted due to poor grades. Instead, he attended the University of Southern
California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights
and Sigma Chi fraternities. Wayne, who stood 6 feet 4+1⁄2 inches (1.94 metres)
tall, also played on the USC football team under Coach Howard Jones. A broken
collarbone injury curtailed his athletic career; Wayne later noted that he was
too terrified of Jones' reaction to reveal the actual cause of his injury, a
bodysurfing accident. He lost his athletic scholarship, and without funds, had to
leave the university.
Career
Early works and first
lead role
As a favor to Coach Jones, who had given silent Western film
star Tom Mix tickets to USC games, director John Ford and Mix hired Wayne as a
prop boy and extra. Wayne later credited his walk, talk, and persona to his
acquaintance with Wyatt Earp, who was good friends with Tom Mix. Wayne soon
moved to bit parts, establishing a longtime friendship with the director who
provided most of those roles, John Ford. Early in this period, he had a minor,
uncredited role as a guard in the 1926 film Bardelys the Magnificent. Wayne
also appeared with his USC teammates playing football in Brown of Harvard
(1926), The Dropkick (1927), and Salute (1929) and Columbia's Maker of Men
(filmed in 1930, released in 1931).
While working for Fox Film Corporation in bit roles, Wayne
was given on-screen credit as "Duke
Morrison" only once, in Words and Music (1929). Director Raoul Walsh
saw him moving studio furniture while working as a prop boy and cast him in his
first starring role in The Big Trail (1930). For his screen name, Walsh
suggested "Anthony Wayne",
after Revolutionary War General "Mad"
Anthony Wayne. Fox Studios chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as sounding "too Italian". Walsh then
suggested "John Wayne".
Sheehan agreed, and the name was set. Wayne was not even present for the
discussion. His pay was raised to $105 a week.
The Big Trail was to be the first big-budget outdoor
spectacle of the sound era, made at a then-staggering cost over $2 million
(over $32.8 million equivalent in 2021), using hundreds of extras and wide
vistas of the American Southwest, still largely unpopulated at the time. To
take advantage of the breathtaking scenery, it was filmed in two versions, a
standard 35 mm version and another in the new 70 mm Grandeur film process,
using an innovative camera and lenses. Many in the audience who saw it in
Grandeur stood and cheered, but only a handful of theaters were equipped to
show the film in its widescreen process, and the effort was largely wasted at
the time. The film was considered a huge box-office flop at the time, but came
to be highly regarded by modern critics.
Subsequent films,
breakthrough, and war years
The Big Trail (1930) lobby card
Girls Demand Excitement (1931)
His Private Secretary (1933)
Riders of Destiny (1933)
The Star Packer (1934)
Conflict (1936)
Born to the West (1937)
Lady for a Night (1942)
After the commercial failure of The Big Trail, Wayne was
relegated to small roles in A pictures, including Columbia's The Deceiver
(1931), in which he played a corpse. He appeared in the serial The Three
Musketeers (1933), an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas novel in which the
protagonists were soldiers in the French Foreign Legion in then-contemporary
North Africa. He played the lead, with his name over the title, in many
low-budget Poverty Row Westerns, mostly at Monogram Pictures and serials for
Mascot Pictures Corporation. By Wayne's own estimation, he appeared in about 80
of these horse operas from 1930 to 1939. In Riders of Destiny (1933), he became
one of the first singing cowboys of film, albeit via dubbing. Wayne also
appeared in some of the Three Mesquiteers Westerns, whose title was a play on
the Dumas classic. He was mentored by stuntmen in riding and other Western skills.
Stuntman Yakima Canutt and Wayne developed and perfected stunts and onscreen
fisticuffs techniques that are still in use. One of the main innovations with
which Wayne is credited in these early Poverty Row Westerns is allowing the
good guys to fight as convincingly as the bad guys, by not always making them
fight clean. Wayne claimed, "Before
I came along, it was standard practice that the hero must always fight clean.
The heavy was allowed to hit the hero in the head with a chair or throw a
kerosene lamp at him or kick him in the stomach, but the hero could only knock
the villain down politely and then wait until he rose. I changed all that. I
threw chairs and lamps. I fought hard and I fought dirty. I fought to
win."
Wayne's second breakthrough role came with John Ford's
Stagecoach (1939). Because of Wayne's B-movie status and track record in
low-budget Westerns throughout the 1930s, Ford had difficulty getting financing
for what was to be an A-budget film. After rejection by all the major studios,
Ford struck a deal with independent producer Walter Wanger in which Claire
Trevor—a much bigger star at the time—received top billing. Stagecoach was a
huge critical and financial success, and Wayne became a mainstream star. Cast
member Louise Platt credited Ford as saying at the time that Wayne would become
the biggest star ever because of his appeal as the archetypal "everyman".
America's entry into World War II resulted in a deluge of
support for the war effort from all sectors of society, and Hollywood was no
exception. Wayne was exempted from service due to his age (34 at the time of
Pearl Harbor) and family status (classified as 3-A – family deferment). Wayne
repeatedly wrote to John Ford saying he wanted to enlist, on one occasion
inquiring whether he could get into Ford's military unit. Wayne did not attempt
to prevent his reclassification as 1-A (draft eligible), but Republic Studios
was emphatically resistant to losing him, since he was their only A-list actor
under contract. Herbert J. Yates, president of Republic, threatened Wayne with
a lawsuit if he walked away from his contract, and Republic Pictures intervened
in the Selective Service process, requesting Wayne's further deferment.
U.S. National Archives records indicate that Wayne, in fact,
did make an application to serve in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
precursor to the modern CIA, but his bid was ultimately unsuccessful. Wayne
toured U.S. bases and hospitals in the South Pacific for three months in 1943
and 1944, with the USO. During this trip, he carried out a request from William
J. Donovan, head of the OSS, to assess whether General Douglas MacArthur,
commander of the South West Pacific Area, or his staff were hindering the work
of the OSS. Donovan later issued Wayne an OSS Certificate of Service to
memorialize Wayne's contribution to the OSS mission.
By many accounts, his failure to serve in the military later
became the most painful part of his life. His widow later suggested that his
patriotism in later decades sprang from guilt, writing: "He would become a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying
to atone for staying home."
Wayne's first color film was Shepherd of the Hills (1941),
in which he co-starred with his longtime friend Harry Carey. The following
year, he appeared in his only film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the
Technicolor epic Reap the Wild Wind (1942), in which he co-starred with Ray
Milland and Paulette Goddard; it was one of the rare times he played a
character with questionable values.
Like most Hollywood stars of his era, Wayne appeared as a
guest on radio programs, such as: The Hedda Hopper Show and The Louella Parsons
Show. He made a number of appearances in dramatic roles, mainly recreations for
radio of his own film roles, on such programs as Screen Directors Playhouse and
Lux Radio Theatre. For six months in 1942, Wayne starred in his own radio
adventure series, Three Sheets to the Wind, produced by film director Tay
Garnett. In the series, an international spy/detective show, Wayne played Dan
O'Brien, a detective who used alcoholism as a mask for his investigatory
endeavors. The show was intended by Garnett to be a pilot of sorts for a film
version, though the motion picture never came to fruition. No episodes of the
series featuring Wayne seem to have survived, though a demonstration episode
with Brian Donlevy in the leading role does exist. Wayne, not Donlevy, played
the role throughout the series' run on NBC.
Director Robert Rossen offered the starring role in All the
King's Men (1949) to Wayne, but he refused, believing the script to be
un-American in many ways. Broderick Crawford, who was eventually cast in the
role, won the 1949 Oscar for best male actor, ironically beating out Wayne, who
had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).
1950s
He lost the leading role of Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter
(1950) to Gregory Peck due to his refusal to work for Columbia Pictures because
its chief, Harry Cohn, had mistreated him years before when he was a young
contract player. Cohn had bought the project for Wayne, but Wayne's grudge was
too deep, and Cohn sold the script to Twentieth Century Fox, which cast Peck in
the role Wayne badly wanted, but for which he refused to bend.
Batjac, the production company co-founded by Wayne in 1952,
was named after the fictional shipping company Batjak in Wake of the Red Witch
(1948), a film based on the novel by Garland Roark. (A spelling error by
Wayne's secretary was allowed to stand, accounting for the variation.) Batjac
(and its predecessor, Wayne-Fellows Productions) was the arm through which
Wayne produced many films for himself and other stars. Its best-known non-Wayne
productions were Seven Men From Now (1956), which started the classic
collaboration between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, and Gun
the Man Down (1956) with contract player James Arness as an outlaw.
One of Wayne's most popular roles was in The High and the
Mighty (1954), directed by William Wellman, and based on a novel by Ernest K.
Gann. His portrayal of a heroic copilot won widespread acclaim. Wayne also
portrayed aviators in Flying Tigers (1942), Flying Leathernecks (1951), Island
in the Sky (1953), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and Jet Pilot (1957).
He appeared in nearly two dozen of John Ford's films over 20
years, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), The
Wings of Eagles (1957). The first movie in which he called someone "Pilgrim", Ford's The Searchers
(1956), is often considered to contain Wayne's finest and most complex
performance.
On May 14, 1958, Hal Kanter's I Married a Woman starring
George Gobel and Diana Dors had its Los Angeles opening. In it, Wayne had a
cameo as himself. On October 2, John Huston's The Barbarian and the Geisha, in
which Wayne played the lead and clashed with his director all the way, had its New
York opening.
Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo premiered on March 18, 1959. In it,
Wayne plays the lead with a supporting cast including Dean Martin, Ricky
Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan and Ward Bond. John Ford's The Horse
Soldiers had its world premiere in Shreveport, Louisiana on June 18. Set during
the Civil War, Wayne shares the lead with William Holden.
Wayne notoriously portrayed Genghis Khan in The Conqueror
(1956), which was panned by critics.
1960s
The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance (1962)
In 1960, Wayne directed and produced The Alamo portraying
Davy Crockett, with Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie. Wayne was nominated for an
Oscar as the producer in the Best Picture category. That year Wayne also played
the lead in Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska also starring Stewart Granger and
Ernie Kovacs. In 1961, Wayne shared the lead with Stuart Whitman in Michael
Curtiz's The Comancheros.
On May 23, 1962, Wayne starred in John Ford's The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance with James Stewart. May 29 marked the premiere of Howard
Hawks's Hatari!, shot on location in Africa with Wayne playing the lead
capturing wild animals from the beds of trucks; all the scenes with animals in
the film are real. On October 4, The Longest Day started its theatrical run,
with Wayne memorably acting with an ensemble cast. Although the other top-level
actors in the film accepted a token payment of only $10,000 each to play their
roles, making the all-star cast feasible for the budget, Wayne was paid a
quarter of a million dollars due to an earlier dispute with producer Darryl F.
Zanuck. During this time, the cast of the television drama, Combat!, were
preparing for the inaugural season. The principal cast (including Vic Morrow)
was to go through a week of basic training at the Army's Infantry Training
Center at Fort Ord in northern California. Morrow noted that the instructors
who worked with the cast at Fort Ord had one common request: not to act like
John Wayne. "Poor John,"
Morrow told a reporter. "I wonder if
he knows he's almost a dirty word in the Army."
On February 20, 1963, Wayne acted in a segment of How the
West Was Won directed by John Ford. On June 12, Wayne played the lead in his
final John Ford film, Donovan's Reef, co-starring Lee Marvin. On November 13,
another film starring Wayne premiered, Andrew V. McLaglen's McLintock!, once again
opposite Maureen O'Hara.
In 1964, Wayne played the leading role in Henry Hathaway's
Circus World with Claudia Cardinale and Rita Hayworth.
On February 15, 1965, Wayne played the brief cameo role of a
centurion in George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told. On April 6, he
shared the screen with Kirk Douglas and Patricia Neal in Otto Preminger's In
Harm's Way. On June 13, he acted in Henry Hathaway's The Sons of Katie Elder
with Dean Martin.
In 1966, Wayne appeared in a cameo role for Melville
Shavelson's Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas.
On May 24, 1967, Wayne played the lead in Burt Kennedy's The
War Wagon with Kirk Douglas as the second lead. His second movie that year,
Howard Hawks's El Dorado, a highly successful partial remake of Rio Bravo with
Robert Mitchum playing Dean Martin's original role, premiered on June 7.
In 1968, Wayne co-directed with Ray Kellogg The Green
Berets. The only major film made during the Vietnam War in support of the war.
Wayne wanted to make this movie because at that time Hollywood had little
interest in making movies about the Vietnam War. During the filming of The
Green Berets, the Degar or Montagnard people of Vietnam's Central Highlands,
fierce fighters against communism, bestowed on Wayne a brass bracelet that he
wore in the film and all subsequent films. Also that year, Wayne played the
lead in Andrew V. McLaglen's Hellfighters, a film about the crews who put out
oil rig fires. Katharine Ross played a supporting role.
On June 13, 1969, Henry Hathaway's True Grit premiered. For
his role as Rooster Cogburn, Wayne won the Best Actor Oscar at the Academy
Awards. In November of that year another film starring Wayne was released,
Andrew V. McLaglen's The Undefeated with Rock Hudson.
1970s: later career
On June 24, 1970, Andrew V. McLaglen's Chisum started to
play in cinemas. Wayne took the role of the owner of a cattle ranch, who finds
out that a businessman is trying to own neighboring land illegally. On
September 16, Howard Hawks' Rio Lobo premiered. Wayne played Col. Cord McNally,
who confronts Confederate soldiers who stole a shipment of gold at the end of
the Civil War. This was another remake of Rio Bravo albeit without a second
lead the box office calibre of Dean Martin or Robert Mitchum.
In June 1971, George Sherman's Big Jake made its debut.
Wayne played the role of an estranged father who must track down a gang who
kidnapped his grandson. The film was a critically acclaimed hit.
In 1972, Wayne starred in Mark Rydell's The Cowboys. Vincent
Canby of The New York Times, who did not particularly care for the film, wrote:
"Wayne is, of course, marvelously
indestructible, and he has become an almost perfect father figure". The
same year, he was selected in the last round of the NFL draft by the Atlanta
Falcons for his past football experience, though the pick was disallowed by
league officials as he was 64 years old at the time.
On February 7, 1973, Burt Kennedy's The Train Robbers
opened; Wayne appeared alongside Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor and Ben Johnson. On
June 27, Andrew V. McLaglen's Cahill U.S. Marshal premiered, with Wayne, George
Kennedy and Gary Grimes. It was a box office failure.
In 1974, Wayne took on the role of the eponymous detective
in John Sturges's crime drama McQ.
On March 25, 1975, Douglas Hickox's Brannigan premiered. In
it, Wayne played a Chicago police lieutenant named Jim Brannigan on the hunt in
London for an organized-crime leader. On October 17, Rooster Cogburn started
its theatrical run; Wayne reprised his role as U.S. Marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn with strong
elements of the plot of The African Queen along with Katharine Hepburn as his
leading lady.
In 1976, Wayne starred in Don Siegel's The Shootist, also
starring Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard and James Stewart. It was Wayne's final
cinematic role, whose main character, J. B. Books, was dying of cancer, to
which Wayne himself succumbed three years later. It contains numerous plot
similarities to The Gunfighter of nearly 30 years before, a role which Wayne had
wanted, but turned down. Upon its theatrical release, it grossed $13,406,138
domestically. About $6 million were earned as US theatrical rentals. The film
received positive reviews. It was named one of the Ten Best Films of 1976 by
the National Board of Review. Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times
ranked The Shootist number 10 on his list of the 10 best films of 1976. The
film was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA film award, and a
Writers Guild of America award.
Death
Although he enrolled in a cancer vaccine study in an attempt
to ward off the disease, Wayne died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979, at the
UCLA Medical Center. He was buried in the Pacific View Memorial Park Cemetery
in Corona del Mar, Newport Beach. According to his son Patrick and his grandson
Matthew Muñoz, who was a priest in the California Diocese of Orange, Wayne
converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death. He requested that his
tombstone read "Feo, Fuerte y
Formal", a Spanish epitaph Wayne described as meaning "ugly, strong, and dignified". His
grave, which was unmarked for 20 years, has been marked since 1999 with the
quotation:
Tomorrow is the most
important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect
when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something
from yesterday.
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