John Wayne

The answer to why this powerful attraction is simple: John Wayne is the quintessential hero of childhood dreams, the archetype of courage and great human values, a paradigm of loyalty, honesty and strength. But also – and this was the definitive thing – he handled the revolver with a mastery that mixed at the same time the speed of Alan Ladd ‘s Shane ( Deep Roots ), the integrity of Gregory Peck ‘s James McKay ( Horizons of Greatness ), the courage of the sheriff Will Kane by Gary Cooper ( Alone in the Face of Danger ), the aim of Lin McAdam by James Stewart ( Winchester 73 ) or the cold impassivity of William Munny byClint Eastwood ( Unforgiven ). And, as if this were not enough, when we saw a John Wayne movie there were three things of which we could be completely sure: that Duke was the good guy in the story, that whatever he did was what had to be done and that at the same time In the end, he would triumph over all the enemies that crossed his path. Tom Doniphon, Ethan Edwards, Sean Thornton, Tom Dunson, John T. Chance, Davy Crockett, Cole Thornton, Ringo Kid, Rooster Cogburn, Kirby York. Names of immortal characters who forged the legend…

But no one is born a legend, and before becoming an icon of cinema, and of the western in particular, John Wayne had to harden himself for many years. His real name was Marion Michael Morrison and he was born in Winterset (Iowa) on May 26, 1907. For a time his middle name was not Michael, but Robert, until his parents, Clyde and Mary, changed it after birth. from his brother Robert. When little Marion was seven years old, the family moved to Palmdale, California, as her father had a lung condition and needed a warmer climate. There they lived on a ranch and the future actor became familiar with horses, animals that would accompany him closely in his film career. However, the family soon moved back to Glendale, near Los Angeles. At the tender age of eleven, Marion was already doing her odd jobs around town; Specifically, she got up at four in the morning to deliver the “Los Angeles Examiner” newspaper, then she went to school and in the afternoon she ran errands for her father, who worked as a pharmacist. And it is around that time, 1918, when she was given her famous nickname: it seems that she was due to a local firefighter, who always saw him walking the streets accompanied by her dog, named Little Duke. With which he himself received the name of Duke, a nickname that would last a lifetime. Apparently, Marion wasn’t a bad student, and thanks to her large frame – in her last year at school she was 6’2” and 180 pounds – she was also pretty good at rugby. His application to the Annapolis Military Academy was rejected, but thanks to a sports scholarship he was able to enroll in Law at the University of Southern California. On the rugby team he met a guy who would become more than just a teammate: his name wasWard Bond would also become an actor and their friendship would last until Bond’s death in 1960. In total they worked together on 22 films and 2 television series.

John Wayne entered the world of cinema by accident, since due to an injury he had to leave the rugby team, for which he also lost his scholarship. With no resources to pay for his studies, he dropped out of university and started working as an assistant at Fox studios. It was 1926. For four years he worked as an extra in almost twenty films and became involved with a guy of Irish origin named John Ford . . The opportunity of a lifetime for him came in 1930, when the great Raoul Walsh was looking for a leading man for his film The Big Journey .. His friend John Ford then remembered the young “Duke” Morrison and recommended him. The movie wasn’t much, but thanks to it, John Wayne was born. And it is that Walsh did not like the name Morrison and he decided to baptize the newcomer with the name that, over the years, would define the essence of the western. Starting from Walsh’s film, John Wayne participated in around sixty low-budget films (dramas, comedies, adventure films and, above all, westerns), with directors such as Joseph Kane , George Sherman or Robert N. Bradbury (for Monogram Pictures) . , and of course John Ford, with whom he made Tragic Legacy (1928), Four Children (1928), Shari, the Enchantress (1929),The triumph of audacity (1929), Underwater tragedy (1930) and The intrepid (1930). And so on until Stagecoach in 1939. This John Ford masterpiece gave John Wayne the role of outlaw Ringo Kid – quiet, noble, brave – and catapulted him to fame. Over the years, the Wayne-Ford pairing would result in several masterful film collaborations.

The next decade is enormously fruitful for Duke. At the beginning of 1940, he would work again with his “godfather” Raoul Walsh in the western Sinister Command and throughout the decade he would gradually forge his character as a hero, thanks to Fordian titles such as Intrepid Men (1940), They were not essential ( 1945), The 3 Godfathers (1948), Fort Apache (1948), The Invincible Legion (1949) and Rio Grande(1950). These last three form the so-called “Cavalry Trilogy”, an epic and nostalgic fresco of life on the frontier, where the threat of the Indians and the harshness of the desert were only comparable to the daring exploits of military pioneers in lands of conquest. By that time John Wayne had become almost a son to Master Ford, such was the rapport between them. In those years he also shared the lead with star Marlene Dietrich in three notable films: Seven Sinners (1940), The Usurpers (1942) and Forge of Hearts (1942). And he also participates in notable war films, such as Tigres del aire (1942) orColonel Jackson’s Patrol (1945), and in maritime adventures such as Pirates of the Caribbean Sea (1942), by Cecil B. DeMille .

Also, in 1948 John Wayne worked for the first time with one of the best and most versatile directors in history, Howard Hawks . The film, Red River , included the deep and obsessive character Tom Dunson, who championed the tormented Ethan Edwards from Desert Centaurs . They say that John Ford, when he saw Wayne’s work on set, snapped at his friend Hawks: but the bastard knows how to act! “… This is how the director of Cape Elizabeth spent them affectionately. In addition to this larger work, in which Duke was marvelously accompanied by the couple formed by Montgomery Clift and Joanne Dru , Wayne went on to shoot four other films with the director of The Beast of My Girl andTo have and not to have , all of them juicy samples of the vigorous way of understanding the cinema of master Hawks: the African adventure Hatari! (1962), and the memorable westerns Río Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1966) and Río Lobo (1970).

It is strange that in his personal life, the “Yankee” John Wayne had a predilection for women of Latino descent. He was married three times. In 1945 he divorced his first wife, Josephine Saenz, after twelve years of marriage and four children. The following year he married Esperanza Baur, but eleven years later he divorced again. His third and last wife was the Peruvian Pilar Palette, with whom he had three children. Among his seven children, the most moviegoers remember Patrick Wayne , also an actor, thanks to his roles in Centaurs of the Desert or The Alamo (1960) .

Curiously, it was in the war genre where John Wayne received his first Oscar nomination. But his character as Sergeant Stryker in the notable Bloody Sands , set in the Battle of Iwo Jima, ultimately didn’t take the prize. Two years later he starred in the first of three masterpieces he was yet to shoot with his friend John Ford. It was a special film, as it talked about their Irish ancestry (both the O’Fearnas and the Morrisons came from there). The quiet man is superlatively charming and romantic and John Wayne’s Sean Thornton is one of the best characters ever created for the screen, an unlikely but perfect mix of rudeness and sensitivity. With the next masterpiece, Centaurs of the desert, the Ford-Wayne alliance came to perfection. Anyone who thought that Wayne was not a good actor, only had to see his deranged look in some passages – after seeing Lucy’s corpse on top of the rock, for example – to understand that Duke is an interior volcano of feelings. Centaurs of the desert is a milestone in cinema: its plot transcends the western, refers to classics such as the Odyssey and speaks of man’s perpetual search. In 1961 John Wayne directed and starred in The Alamo (1960), a long-cherished personal project. The film, praised by Ford – many see his hand behind many scenes – is a recreation, full of epic strength, of the fight for Texas independence. Although economically it almost ruined John Wayne, the truth is that today he retains all his power of attraction. And the following year he shot his last masterpiece with John Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The Maine director knew how to create a nostalgic fresco about the end of the West, its pioneers, its bandits and its heroes. No one better to personify that reality than John Wayne, because he “is” certainly Tom Doniphon, with all the charge of romanticism and honesty that lives in the heart of the Shinbone cowboy, true hero of the legend.

From 1964 Duke’s health worsened and he was diagnosed with cancer. He has a lung removed and continues in the breach. Among other things, he still had to win the Oscar, thanks to his role as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit ( 1969), Henry Hathaway ‘s meritorious film . His latest films include Chisum (1970), the aforementioned Río Lobo (1970), Howard Hawks’ swan song, The Rifle and the Bible (1975), alongside Katharine Hepburn , and The Last Gunman (1976), which was his farewell to the cinema, sad and twilight. Meanwhile John Wayne survives a second cancer.

At the beginning of 1979, the year of his death, and at the request of the actresses Maureen O’Hara and Elizabeth Taylor , he was awarded nothing more and nothing less than the gold medal of the United States of America Congress. The inscription said it all: “John Wayne, American.” With a third cancer in his body, already hovering between life and death, John Wayne requests the spiritual assistance of a Catholic priest. He is cared for by Father Francis Curtis, who administers his baptism, and John Wayne is received into the Catholic Church. Shortly after he dies. It was June 11, 1979.