IMDB

Actor

1907-05-26 · Winterset, Iowa, USA · Male

1 series in the catalog

Marion Robert Morrison (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), known professionally as John Wayne, was an American actor. Nicknamed "Duke", he became a popular icon through his starring roles in films which were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, especially in Western and war movies. His career flourished from the silent film era of the 1920s to the American New Wave in the 1970s, as he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions. He was among the top box-office draws for three decades, and appeared with many other important Hollywood stars of his era. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Wayne as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.

Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, but grew up in Southern California. After losing his football scholarship to the University of Southern California due to a bodysurfing accident, he began working for the Fox Film Corporation. He appeared mostly in small parts, but gained a leading role in Raoul Walsh's Western The Big Trail (1930), an early widescreen film epic that was a box-office failure. He played leading roles in numerous B movies during the 1930s, most of them Westerns, without becoming a major name. John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to biographer Ronald Davis, "John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage".

Wayne's other roles in Westerns included a cattleman driving his herd on the Chisholm Trail in Red River (1948); a Civil War veteran whose niece is abducted by Comanches in The Searchers (1956); a troubled rancher competing with a lawyer (James Stewart) for a woman's hand in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); and a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in True Grit (1969), for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor. Wayne is also remembered for his roles in The Quiet Man (1952) with Maureen O'Hara; Rio Bravo (1959) with Dean Martin; and The Longest Day (1962). In his final screen performance, he starred as an aging gunfighter suffering from cancer in The Shootist (1976).

Wayne made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1979, and died of stomach cancer two months later. In 1980, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States.

Early life and education

Wayne was born as Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa. The local paper, Winterset Madisonian, reported on page 4 of its May 30, 1907 edition that he weighed 13 lb (around 6 kg) at birth. Wayne later claimed that his middle name was changed from Robert to Michael when his parents decided to give the name Robert to their next son, but extensive research has found no record of a legal change. His legal name apparently remained Marion Robert Morrison throughout his life, although his original name is almost always referred to as Marion Michael Morrison.

Wayne's father, Clyde Leonard Morrison (1884–1937), was the son of Marion Mitchell Morrison (1845–1915), a Union Army veteran of the American Civil War. His mother, Mary "Molly" Alberta Brown (1885–1970), was from Lancaster County, Nebraska. Wayne had Scottish, Scotch-Irish, English, and Irish ancestry. His great-great-grandfather Robert Morrison (b. 1782) left County Antrim, Ireland, with his mother, arriving in New York in 1799 and later settling in Adams County, Ohio. The Morrisons were originally from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Wayne was raised Presbyterian.

The family moved to Palmdale, California, and in 1916 to Glendale, where they lived at 404 Isabel Street and his father worked as a pharmacist. Wayne attended Wilson Middle School and then Glendale Union High School, where he performed well in both sports and academics. He played on the school's football team and joined its debating team. He was president of the Latin Society and contributed to the school's newspaper sports column.

A local fireman on his route to school began calling him "Little Duke" because he was always accompanied by his large Airedale Terrier, Duke. Wayne preferred "Duke" to "Marion", and the nickname stayed with him. As a teenager, he worked in an ice-cream shop owned by a man who shod horses for Hollywood studios. He was active in the Order of DeMolay and was later inducted into its Hall of Fame. He played football for the 1924 league-champion Glendale High School team.

Wayne applied to the U.S. Naval Academy but was not accepted because of poor grades. He instead attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and Sigma Chi fraternity. Standing at 6 feet 4+1⁄2 inches (1.94 metres) tall, he played on the USC Trojans football team under coach Howard Jones. A broken collarbone curtailed his athletic career, and Wayne later said he was too afraid of Jones's reaction to admit that the injury had occurred during a bodysurfing accident. He lost his athletic scholarship and, without funds, left the university.

Career

Early works and first lead role

As a favor to coach Jones, who had given silent Western film star Tom Mix tickets to USC games, director John Ford and Mix hired Wayne as a prop boy and extra. Wayne later credited his walk, talk, and persona to his acquaintance with Wyatt Earp, who was good friends with Mix. Wayne soon moved to bit parts, establishing a longtime friendship with Ford, who provided most of those roles. Early in this period, he had a minor, uncredited role as a guard in the 1926 film Bardelys the Magnificent. He also appeared with his USC teammates playing football in Brown of Harvard (1926), The Dropkick (1927), Salute (1929), and Columbia's Maker of Men (filmed in 1930, released in 1931). While working for Fox Film Corporation in bit roles, Wayne received on-screen credit as "Duke Morrison" only once, in Words and Music (1929). Director Raoul Walsh saw him moving studio furniture while working as a prop boy and cast him in his first starring role in The Big Trail (1930). Walsh suggested "Anthony Wayne" as a screen name, after Revolutionary War General "Mad" Anthony Wayne. Fox Studios chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as sounding "too Italian". Walsh then suggested "John Wayne". Sheehan agreed, and the name was set. Wayne was not present for the discussion. His pay was raised to $105 a week.

The Big Trail was intended as the first big‑budget outdoor spectacle of the sound era, made at a then‑staggering cost of $1.25 million ($25.08 million equivalent in 2026), using hundreds of extras and wide vistas of the American Southwest, still largely unpopulated at the time. To take advantage of the scenery, it was filmed in two versions: a standard 35 mm version and another in the new 70 mm Grandeur film process, using an innovative camera and lenses. Many in the audience who saw it in Grandeur stood and cheered, but only a handful of theaters were equipped to show the film in its widescreen format, and the effort was largely wasted. The film was considered a major box‑office failure at the time, but later came to be highly regarded by modern critics.

Subsequent films and breakthrough

After the commercial failure of The Big Trail, Wayne was relegated to small roles in A pictures, including Columbia's The Deceiver (1931), in which he played a corpse. From 1932 to 1933, he starred in six B movie Westerns for Leon Schlesinger Productions and Warner Bros. Pictures. Wayne disliked their constant reuse of footage starring Ken Maynard and their extremely cheap production value, which reflected Schlesinger's focus on his more successful Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated film series.

Wayne appeared in the serial The Three Musketeers (1933), an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas novel in which the protagonists were soldiers in the French Foreign Legion in then-contemporary North Africa. He played the lead, with his…