John Wayne

From college football to Fox

Marion Robert Morrison was born on 26 May 1907 in Winterset, Iowa, and grew up in Glendale, California. A football player, he won an athletic scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he played under coach Howard Jones. A shoulder injury, which he later blamed on a bodysurfing accident, ended his playing days and cost him the scholarship.

As a favor to Jones, John Ford and western star Tom Mix got him work at Fox as a prop man and extra. Ford gave him his first bit parts. In 1929 he appeared as a speakeasy patron in Benjamin Stoloff's Speakeasy, a boxing picture whose hero wins back his title at Madison Square Garden. A year later Raoul Walsh made him the lead of The Big Trail, and the studio renamed him John Wayne. The film flopped.

B westerns and the screen fight

From 1930 to 1939 Wayne made, by his own count, about 80 low-budget westerns, mostly for Monogram and in serials for Mascot. In 1932 he met stuntman and rodeo champion Yakima Canutt, who doubled him on a motorcycle in The Shadow of the Eagle. Together they worked out a way to shoot fights: set the actors at the right angle to the camera and a punch passes in front of the face without touching it, yet looks like it lands. Accounts differ on who had the idea first, but these staged brawls replaced the clumsy wrestling of early talkie westerns and became the Hollywood standard.

Canutt doubled Wayne again in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and staged the coach chase. The film made Wayne a star.

Boxing on screen

In Archie Mayo's The Life of Jimmy Dolan (1933), starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Wayne had a small part as Smith, a frightened boxer. Three years later at Universal he led David Howard's Conflict, adapted from Jack London's novel The Abysmal Brute. He played Pat Glendon, a lumberjack turned bare-knuckle fighter working for a ring that fixes bouts. Facing Gus Carrigan, played by Ward Bond, he refuses to take a dive and wins on the level.

His defining boxing role is Sean Thornton in Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). A former American heavyweight known as Trooper Thorn, Thornton has killed an opponent in the ring and sworn never to fight again. Back in his Irish home village, he ends up taking on his brother-in-law, Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen): a half-comic brawl, supposedly under Marquess of Queensberry rules, that rolls across the countryside and ends in the pub. Shot in Cong, County Mayo, the film won Ford his fourth Oscar for Best Director.

An action star

Wayne became the leading man of Ford and Howard Hawks: Red River (1948), The Searchers (1956), Rio Bravo (1959), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). He directed The Alamo (1960), playing Davy Crockett, and co-directed The Green Berets (1968) with Ray Kellogg. True Grit (1969) won him the Oscar for Best Actor in 1970. His last film was Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976). He died on 11 June 1979 in Los Angeles, after 179 film and television productions, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1980.