John Wayne Biography
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IMAGES:
Picture Gallery 1 Miscellaneous Pictures
Picture Gallery 2 Miscellaneous Pictures
Movie Still Photos
Wayne's Western Images
John Wayne Posters, Prints, Photos
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John Wayne in Brief: Fact Files
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Gender: Male
Occupation: Actor
Nationality: United States
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Detailed Biography of John Wayne: Full Biography
WAYNE, JOHN. Born Marion Michael Morrison May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa; died June 11, 1979; actor, director. Sons Patrick and Ethan are actors; son Michael is a producer. The greatest western hero in the movies, ‘‘Duke’’ Wayne appeared in nearly 150 pictures before 1965, solidly establishing him as a true American icon—a symbol of rugged individualism, frontier spirit, combat bravery, and Christian values. His late-period films, while continuing to address these ideas, would serve as anachronistic comments on his earlier image—now altered to that of a physically wearying man who stands face-to-face with his own mortality. Fittingly, over the next ten years, he would pair with others from his generation—Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, and Lauren Bacall, as well as directors Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, and Otto Preminger. His first great film of the period is Hawks’ El Dorado, which has at its center the declining physical condition of Wayne’s aging gunfighter Cole Thornton. Disturbed by the antiwar protests of the times, Wayne made his second foray into directing (after 1960’s The Alamo) with the misguided and misinformed patriotism of The Green Berets, a muddled defense of the Vietnam conflict that failed to separate the bravery of American soldiers from the recklessness of the Johnson administration. It was an exercise of historical revisionism that he would again repeat with Chisum, an inaccurate expansionist tale of cattle baron John Chisum’s role in the Lincoln County War and the murders of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Amid the innocuous westerns directed by the likes of Andrew V. McLaglen and Burt Kennedy was his Oscarwinning role for True Grit as the eye-patched marshal Rooster Cogburn, a beautifully acted role that he would reprise in the lesser Rooster Cogburn opposite Katharine Hepburn. Attempting to transfer his mythic western hero to the city à la his successor Clint Eastwood, Wayne made the police dramas McQ and Brannigan, the former interesting in its willingness to expose the police department (a law-and-order institution that didn’t exist in the western world of the sheriff) as wholly corrupt, while the latter is a silly variation on Eastwood’s Coogan’s Bluff. His final film, Don Siegel’s The Shootist,isafitting farewell that, after opening with a montage of the Duke’s past glories, tells the story of a cancer-stricken gunfighter who teaches a boy to be a man—a more honest variation on the themes of his earlier western legacy picture The Cowboys. Three years later, Wayne himself would die from cancer. ‘‘If this greatest of all western heroes can age and die, so, obviously, can all others’’ (Jack Nachbar, Focus on the Western).
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