John Wayne was an actor who came to epitomise the American West on film, appearing in over 170 motion pictures between 1926 and 1976.
Born Marion Michael Morrison in 1907, Wayne’s family moved to Glendale, California, when he was six years old.
As a teen, he rose at 4am to deliver newspapers, and after school he played American football and made deliveries for local stores.
When he graduated from high school, he hoped to attend the US Naval Academy.
However, after the Academy rejected him, he accepted a full scholarship to play football at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
In the summer of 1926, Wayne’s football coach found him a job as an assistant prop man on the set of a movie directed by John Ford.
Ford started to use Wayne as an extra, and eventually began to trust him with some larger roles.
In 1930, Ford recommended Wayne for Fox’s epic Western, The Big Trail.
Wayne won the part, but the movie did poorly, and Fox let his contract lapse.
During the next decade, Wayne worked tirelessly in countless low-budget Western films, sharpening his talents and developing a distinct persona for his cowboy characters.
Finally, his big break came in his brilliant 1939 western, Stagecoach, in which Wayne played the role of Ringo Kid. He imbued the character with the essential traits that would inform nearly all of his subsequent screen roles: a tough and clear-eyed honesty, unquestioning valour, and a laconic, almost plodding manner.
After Stagecoach, Wayne’s career took off.
Among the dozens of Westerns he appeared in – many of them directed by Ford – were memorable classics like Tall in the Saddle (1944), Red River (1948), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
In all these films, The Duke, as he became known, embodied the simple, and perhaps simplistic, cowboy values of decency, honesty, and integrity.
By the late 1960s, some Americans had tired of Wayne and his simplistically masculine and patriotic characters.
Increasingly, Western movies were rejecting the simple moral codes championed by Wayne and replacing them with a more complex and tragic view of the American West.
However, Wayne proved more adaptable than many expected.
In his Oscar-winning role in True Grit (1969), he began to escape the narrow confines of his own good-guy image.
His final film, The Shootist (1976), won over even his most severe critics. Wayne –who was himself battling lung cancer – played a dying gunfighter whose moral codes and principles no longer fitted in a changing world.
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