John Wayne | Biography, Movies, & Facts (2024)

John Wayne (born May 26, 1907, Winterset, Iowa, U.S.—died June 11, 1979, Los Angeles, California) was a major American motion-picture actor who embodied the image of the strong, taciturn cowboy or soldier and who in many ways personified the idealized American values of his era.

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’s 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 classic 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 Eugene O’Neill 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.

Speculation exists as to whether Wayne purposely avoided military service during World War II, but 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 Howard 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 honour 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 behaviour and blatant bigotry reveal him to be as mad as he is heroic. Ford’s exploration of the dark underbelly of Old West legends culminated in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a film that both questions and justifies the “when the truth interferes with the legend, print the legend” philosophy of 19th-century journalists of the American West. In all, the Ford-Wayne films present an Old West rendered obsolete by the very society it helped to create. Wayne also appeared in films for Ford that were not westerns, including standouts such as The Quiet Man (1952) and Donovan’s Reef (1963).

Howard 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 Montgomery 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 standout films for other directors include Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in which his performance as an uncompromisingly tough Marine sergeant earned an 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 a screen career of more than 40 years, Wayne was honoured with an Academy 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, to some, the greatest Hollywood star of all time. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.