“Courage is being scared to death…. and saddling up anyway” – John Wayne.

Even 40 plus years after his death, the name

John Wayne needs little introduction. Without question, he is one of the single

most famous movie stars of the mid-twentieth century and probably the biggest

western movie star of all time.  John

Wayne was born on 26 May 1907 as Marion Robert Morrison, although would be

given the nickname Little Duke by a local fireman and the Duke part stuck as

Wayne preferred it to Marion, and although he was born in Winterset, Iowa, he

spent most of his formative years in California.

An avid athlete and a man’s man from a young

age, John Wayne’s trajectory in life shifted radically after a bodysurfing

accident injured him and prevented him from getting the football scholarship he

was striving for.

With his dreams of making an impact on a

professional sports stage shattered, John Wayne began thinking about a

different kind of stage and started working for the Fox Film Corporation,

mainly filling in with bit parts or as a background extra and although he

appeared in over 20 films in the late 1920’s he went uncredited for most of

them, with one notable exception when in 1929’s Words and Music, he was

credited as Duke Morrison. His first on-screen break came with The Big Trail, a

western which premiered in 1930, and although the film was a box office failure,

it helped him to get more roles albeit, still as a b-list actor. It was also

the film which saw him first credited as John Wayne, a decision that was made

by the film’s director Raoul Walsh without Wayne even being present. He was

paid $105 per week.

He appeared in over 80 projects throughout the

1930s, lots of them uncredited and it wasn’t until 1939’s Stagecoach in the

role of Ringo Kid that John Wayne became a household name. From this point

forward, the star power of John Wayne was exceptional and during his prime simply

having him appear in a film was almost a guarantee that it would be a success.

He would star in over 170 films over the course of his career and is second

only to Clark Gable in terms of the number of tickets sold. He became not only

an American icon, but he also became an international one too and represented

what many saw as being synonymous with the American frontier and what the cowboy

spirit was all about.

John Wayne had a memorable screen presence due to the way that he walked and the way he delivered dialogue, something which Wayne himself credited to his acquaintance with Wyatt Earp and audiences flocked to see the westerns that became his speciality including 1948’s Red River, The Searchers in 1956, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962, which also starred James Stewart, and his compelling role as Rooster Cogburn in the film True Grit which premiered in 1969 and for which he was awarded an Academy Award as best actor. It wasn’t just westerns. He played a soldier in The Longest Day, a firefighter in 1962’s Hellfighters, and a cop in 1974’s McQ, but it would be westerns that he would be most remembered for and which form the majority of the film work that became his legacy.

As it turned out, John Wayne was not only

acting as the personification of the American dream but his own political views

seem to have been built upon the concept of American exceptionalism and to that

end, he was strongly involved politically as a conservative in Hollywood and

was a vehement denouncer of Communism throughout his life. In fact, he was so

outspoken that there is talk that although Joseph Stalin was a fan of John