John Wayne, Hollywood Giant

He was born and Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, on May 26, 1907. when Marion was 6 years old, his father, because of ill health, moved the family to Southern California and became a homesteader with an 80-acre farm. Not long after, the family settled in Glendale, where Mr. Morrison opened a pharmacy. The store was in the same building as a theater, and young Marion, who rose at 4 A.M. to deliver newspapers and then, after school and football practice, delivered orders from the store, went to the movies four or five times a week, free.
He had an Airedale Terrier, called Duke, and it is from the dog that his nickname derived.

After various part time jobs he became a member of an outstanding football team at high school. His athletic talents brought him a football scholarship at the University of Southern California, but in his second year he broke an ankle and dropped out.

While at the university, Wayne, along with many of his fellow athletes, began working at the local film studios. Western star Tom Mix got him a summer job in the prop department in exchange for football tickets, and Wayne soon moved on to bit parts, establishing a long friendship with director John Ford, who provided most of those bit parts. Early in this period, Wayne appeared with his USC teammates playing on-screen football in The Dropkick and Brown of Harvard, and was one of the featured football players in Columbia Pictures' Maker of Men (filmed in 1930 and released in 1931). In 1930 in a movie called The Big Trail he changed his name to John Wayne. The journey to major stardom had begun.

In his first starring role and the first time as John Wayne, Duke, playing the part of a wagontrain scout, gives the following speech when during a blizzard the settlers are about to give up.

"No you're not. We can't turn back! We're blazing a trail that started in England.

Not even the storms of the sea could turn back those first settlers - and they carried it on further, they blazed it on through the wilderness of Kentucky. Famine, hunger, not even massacres could stop them. Now we've picked up the trail again and nothing can stop us, not even the snows of winter nor the peaks of the highest mountain. We're building a nation, but we've got to suffer. No great trail was ever blazed without hardship. And you've got to fight. That's life! And when you stop fightin', that's death! What are you going to do, lay down and die? Not in a thousand years! You're going on with me!"


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From his job in the Props department Wayne started learning the business and gradually worked his way into real acting roles. Between 1933 and 1939, he made more than 40 films, mainly westerns, until John Ford finally convinced United Artists to give him the role of the Ringo Kid in his classic film Stagecoach. Each rifle shot and closeup rang out the news: a new star is born.

Amazon.com Stagecoach
This landmark 1939 Western began the legendary relationship between John Ford and John Wayne, and became the standard for all subsequent Westerns. It solidified Ford as a major director and established Wayne as a charismatic screen presence. Seen today, Stagecoach still impresses as the first mature instance of a Western that is both mythic and poetic. The story about a cross-section of troubled passengers unraveling under the strain of Indian attack contains all of Ford's incomparable storytelling trademarks--particularly swift action and social introspection--underscored by the painterly landscape of Monument Valley.


After Stagecoach Wayne quickly established his versatility in a variety of major roles: a young seaman in Eugene O'Neill's The Long Voyage home, a tragic captain in Reap the Wild Wind, a rodeo rider in the comedy A Lady Takes a Chance.

"I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people, and I require the same from them." --as J.B. Books in THE SHOOTIST (1976)

With America's entry into World War II the majority of male leads left Hollywood to serve overseas. John Wayne saw his just-beginning stardom at risk. Despite enormous pressure from his inner circle of friends, he put off enlisting but eventually, when he did try he was refused because of an old football injury. So he poured himself into the war effort by making inspirational films such as The fighting Seabees and They Were Expendable.

John Wayne and U.S. Army Special Forces Operational Detachment A-323 at Camp Trai Bi, Tay Ninh Province, Republic of Vietnam, June 1966.

He also became a popular visitor to the war zones in World War II and aferwards in Korea and Vietnam. By the 1950s, perhaps in large part due to the military aspect of films such as the Sands of Iwo Jima, Flying Tigers, They Were Expendable, and the Ford cavalry trilogy, Wayne had become an icon to all the branches of the U.S. Military, even in light of his actual lack of military service. Many veterans have said their reason for serving was in some part related to watching Wayne's movies.

"This is where we seperate the men from the boys. Saddle Up".

By the late 1940's, Wayne had already been transformed from a dashing young adventurer to an older one, no less dashing, but in a somewhat more restrained tempo. In "Red River," he portrayed a ruthless cattle baron, not altogether a good guy, but one with some depth to him. In this instance, Montgomery Clift, the co-star, represented the forces for good.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Wayne began to produce his films as well as star in them, and in 1960, he made his directorial debut with THE ALAMO, a film which he also produced and starred in (as Davy Crockett)

When he wasn't producing or directing, Wayne continued to act in a variety of different films throughout the 1960s, among them Hatari! (1962), Donovan's Reef (1963), El Dorado (1967), The Green Berets(1968) and True Grit (1969), for which he won his first and only Best Actor Oscar. By the 1970s however, he found himself playing prototypes of his established slow-talking, straight-walking screen persona in a series of westerns which succeeded financially, if not critically, because of the star's enduring box-office appeal. Reminding audiences of the actor behind the personality however, in his final film, The shootist (1976) (the story of an aging gunslinger who, like Wayne himself, finds out he's dying of cancer), the icon gave one of his greatest film performances.

John Wayne died of lung cancer on June 11, 1979 and was interred in the Pacific View Memorial Park cemetery in Corona del Mar, Orange County, California.
Before his death, Duke wanted a simple epitaph carved on his headstone, "Feo, Fuerte y Formal". Translated it means "He was Ugly, Strong, and had Dignity". His wishes were never carried out. His headstone is a bronze plaque featuring an image of John Wayne astride a horse, near the Alamo.

Its inscription reads:

"Tommorow 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 learnt something from yesterday."

"If you can see them, they're not Apaches."-- as Captain Kirby York in FORT APACHE (1948).

It could be argued that no other film actor has ever come to symbolize so many things: rugged masculinity, the frontier, even America itself. The Duke has remained, in the truest sense, an icon. Even his voice seems etched in the collective memory: With a simple "pilgrim," a whole lost world is summoned.
It's been not only 100 years since his birth, but nearly three decades since his death. Yet Wayne still remains one of the most recognizable faces in the world. He is, as New York Times film critic Vincent Camby once wrote, "marvelously indestructible."

"Women -- I never met one yet that was half as reliable as a horse." -- as Sam McCord in NORTH TO ALASKA (1960).

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