John Wayne

John Wayne, in trailer for the film Rio Bravo

John Wayne (born Marion Michael Morrison; 26 May 1907 – 11 June 1979) was an American film actor and director who was active through fifty years from his first accredited appearance in 1926 until his last film, The Shootist, in 1976. Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa and died of cancer in Los Angeles. He was best known for his many appearances in films of the Western genre. He is famously associated with director John Ford, though he worked with several other well-known directors including George Stevens, Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway. Wayne was himself the director of five movies, though he was only credited twice.

His best known films include Stagecoach (1939), Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Fort Apache (1948), Red River (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Rio Grande (1950), The Quiet Man (1950), The Searchers (1956), The Horse Soldiers (1959), Rio Bravo (1959), The Alamo (1960), North to Alaska (1960), The Comancheros (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Longest Day (1962), Donovan's Reef (1963), The War Wagon (1967), El Dorado (1967), True Grit (1969), Chisum (1970), Big Jake (1970), The Cowboys (1972) and The Shootist.

Among his co-stars were Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, John Carradine, Ray Milland, Paulette Goddard, Susan Hayward, Raymond Massey, Robert Preston, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, Montgomery Clift, John Ireland, Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson, Richard Jaeckel, Forrest Tucker, Maureen O'Hara, Barry Fitzgerald, Vera Miles, Jeffrey Hunter, William Holden, Dean Martin, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Stewart Granger, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, Lee Van Cleef, Edmond O'Brien, Woody Strode, Strother Martin, Dorothy Lamour, Kirk Douglas, Howard Keel, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Richard Boone, Ann-Margret and Jack Elam.

Wayne's usual persona on screen was the humorous, warm-hearted tough guy whose ethos was summarised by Wayne himself in terms of "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do". Though he was not always on the right side of the law per se, as in The War Wagon, he was always the heroic figure who held the moral high ground. None of his westerns could properly be termed revisionist, although The Searchers and True Grit had revisionist elements. Equally, with the possible exceptions of "Ethan Edwards" in The Searchers and "Tom Doniphon" in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Wayne's characters embodied the ideals of the traditional cinema hero. Some aspects of the Edwards and Doniphon characters, arguably Wayne's two greatest roles, foreshadowed the anti-hero popularised in the 1960s by the likes of Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef.