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John Wayne (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979) was an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award-winning American film actor. He epitomized rugged masculinity and has become an enduring American icon. He is famous for his distinctive voice, walk and physical presence. He was also known for his conservative political views and his support in the 1950s for anti-communist positions.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Wayne 13th among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time. A Harris Poll released in 2007 placed Wayne third among America's favorite film stars,^[1] the only deceased star on the list and the only one who has appeared on the poll every year.

His career began in silent movies in the 1920s and he was a major star from the 1940s to the 1970s. He is closely associated with Westerns and war movies, but he also made a wide range of films from various genres - biographies, romantic comedies, police dramas, and more.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Film career 3 See also 4 Notes and sources 5 Further reading 6 External links

[edit] Early life

Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa,^[2] but his name was changed to Marion Michael Morrison when his parents decided to name their next son Robert. His family was Presbyterian. His father, Clyde Leonard Morrison (1884–1937), was of Irish and Scots-Irish and English descent,^[3] and the son of American Civil War veteran Marion Mitchell Morrison (20 January 1845–05 December 1915). His mother was the former Mary Alberta Brown (1885–1970) of Lancaster County, Nebraska.

Wayne's family moved to Palmdale, California, and then to Glendale, California in 1911, where his father worked as a pharmacist in a drug store. A local fireman at the firehouse on his route to school in Glendale started calling him "Little Duke", because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier dog, Duke.^[4][5] He preferred "Duke" to "Marion", and the name stuck for the rest of his life.

As a teen, Wayne worked in an ice cream shop for a man who shoed horses for Hollywood studios. He was also active as a member of the Order of DeMolay, a youth organization associated with the Freemasons, which he joined when he came of age. He attended Wilson Middle School in Glendale. He played football for the 1924 champion Glendale High School team.

Wayne applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not accepted. He instead attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. Wayne also played on the USC football team under legendary coach Howard Jones. An injury curtailed his athletic career; Wayne later noted he was too terrified of Jones' reaction to reveal the actual cause of his injury, which was bodysurfing at the “Wedge” at the tip of the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach. He lost his athletic scholarship and without funds had to leave the university.^[6]

Wayne began working at the local film studios. Western star Tom Mix had got him a summer job in the prop department in exchange for football tickets. Wayne soon moved on to bit parts, establishing a long friendship with director John Ford, who provided most of those parts. Early in this period, Wayne appeared with his USC teammates playing on-screen football in The Dropkick, Brown of Harvard, and Salute, and was one of the featured football players in Columbia Pictures' Maker of Men (filmed in 1930 and released in 1931).^[7]

[edit] Film career

After two years working as a prop man at the Fox Film Corporation for $75 a week, his first starring role was in the 1930 movie The Big Trail. The first western epic sound motion picture established his screen credentials, although it was a commercial failure. Before this film, Wayne had only been given on-screen credit once (in Words and Music), as "Duke Morrison". The director Raoul Walsh, who "discovered" Wayne, suggested giving him the stage name "Anthony Wayne", after Revolutionary War general "Mad Anthony" Wayne. Fox Studios chief Winfield Sheehan rejected "Anthony Wayne" as sounding "too Italian." Walsh then suggested "John Wayne." Sheehan agreed and the name was set. Wayne himself was not even present for the discussion.^[8] His pay was raised to $105 a week.

Wayne continued making westerns, most notably at Monogram Pictures, and serials for Mascot Pictures Corporation, including The Three Musketeers (1933), a French Foreign Legion tale with no resemblance to the novel which inspired its title. Coincidentally, he also appeared in some of the Three Mesquiteers westerns whose title was a play on the Alexandre Dumas, père classic. He was tutored by stuntmen in riding and other western skills.^[7] He and famed stuntman Yakima Canutt developed and perfected stunts still used today.

Beginning in 1928 and extending over the next 35 years, Wayne appeared in more than twenty of John Ford's films, including Stagecoach (1939), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). His performance in Stagecoach made him a star.

His 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 Harry Carey epic Reap the Wild Wind, 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.

In 1949, director Robert Rossen offered the starring role of All the King's Men to Wayne. Wayne refused, believing the script to be un-American in many ways. Broderick Crawford, who eventually got the role, won the 1949 Oscar for best male actor, ironically beating out Wayne, who had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima.

He lost the leading role in The Gunfighter to Gregory Peck because of his refusal to work for Columbia Pictures after Columbia chief Harry Cohn had mistreated him years before as 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 refused to bend for.

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 airman won widespread acclaim. Wayne also portrayed aviators in The Flying Tigers, Island in the Sky, Flying Leathernecks and The Wings of Eagles and Jet Pilot.

The Searchers continues to be widely regarded as perhaps Wayne's finest and most complex performance. In 2006 Premiere Magazine ran an industry poll in which his portrayal of Ethan Edwards was rated the 87th greatest performance in film history. He named his youngest son Ethan after the character.

John Wayne won a Best Actor Oscar for True Grit (1969). Wayne was also nominated as the producer of Best Picture for The Alamo, one of two films he directed. The other was The Green Berets (1968), the only major film made during the Vietnam War to support the war.^[6] During the filming of 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.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Wayne played the lead in 142 of his film appearances.

Batjac, the production company co-founded by Wayne, was named after the fictional shipping company Batjak in Wake of the Red Witch. (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 production was the highly acclaimed Seven Men From Now, which started the classic collaboration between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott.

In later years, Wayne was recognized as a sort of American natural resource, and his various critics, political and film, looked on him with more respect. Abbie Hoffman, the radical of the 1960s, paid tribute to Wayne's singularity. Reviewing The Cowboys, made in 1972, Vincent Canby, film critic 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." But years before he became anything close to a father figure, Wayne had become a symbolic male figure, a man of impregnable virility and the embodiment of simplistic, laconic virtues, packaged in an enormous frame.

He had a handsome and hearty face, with crinkles around eyes that gave the impression of a man of action, an outdoor man who chafed at a settled life. He was laconic on screen. And when he shambled into view, audiences sensed the arrival of coiled vigor awaiting only provocation to be sprung. His demeanor and his roles were those of a man who did not look for trouble but was relentless in tackling it when it affronted him. This screen presence emerged particularly under the ministrations of directors John Ford and Howard Hawks.

[edit] See also

• List of film collaborations

[edit] Notes and sources

[edit] Further reading

• Baur, Andreas, and Bitterli, Konrad. "Brave Lonesome Cowboy. Der Mythos des Westerns in der Gegenwartskunst oder: John Wayne zum 100. Geburtstag". Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg. Nuremberg 2007 ISBN 978-3-939738-15-2
• Roberts, Randy, and James S. Olson. John Wayne: American. New York: Free Press, 1995 ISBN 978-0029238370
• Campbell, James T. "Print the Legend: John Wayne and Postwar American Culture". Reviews in American History, Volume 28, Number 3, September 2000, pp. 465-477
• Shepherd, Donald, and Robert Slatzer, with Dave Grayson. Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne. New York: Doubleday, 1985 ISBN 0-385-17893-X
• Carey, Harry Jr. A Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1994 ISBN 0-8108-2865-0
• Clark, Donald & Christopher Anderson. John Wayne's The Alamo: The Making of the Epic Film. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995 ISBN 0-8065-1625-9 (pbk.)
• Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999 ISBN 0-684-81161-8
• McCarthy, Todd. Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. New York: Grove Press, 1997 ISBN 0-8021-1598-5
• Maurice Zolotow., Shooting Star: A Biography of John Wayne. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974 ISBN 0671829696
• Jim Beaver, "John Wayne". Films in Review, Volume 28, Number 5, May 1977, pp. 265-284.
• McGivern, Carolyn. John Wayne: A Giant Shadow. Bracknell, England: Sammon, 2000 ISBN 0-9540031-0-1
• Munn, Michael. John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth. London: Robson Books, 2003 ISBN 0-451-21244-4

[edit] External links

• The ORIGINAL John Wayne Message Board
• The Official John Wayne® Website
• The Birthplace of John Wayne Official Website
• John Wayne Cancer Foundation
• John Wayne Cancer Institute
• John Wayne at www.NNDB.com
• John Wayne walks into Stardom
• The Duke
• Wayne & Martin, The Sons of Katie Elder photo: "Too many cooks"
• When Legend Becomes Fact: John Wayne and the American Identity