Home> Facts and Trivia > Stars > John Wayne
John Wayne Facts
| Sign | Gemini |
| Born |
May 26, 1907 Winterset, IA |
| Died |
Jun 11, 1979 Los Angeles, CA |
| Age | Died at 72 |
| Total Facts | 202 |
His last name was suggested by Raoul Walsh. Walsh, having read a book about American Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne, suggested "Wayne"; the studio added "John", hence, "John Wayne".
His nickname of "The Duke", was picked from his favorite horse, that he personally named Duke. He rode Duke, during the filming of Western movies, while acting, in his earlier years.
His Oscar win for True Grit (1969) was widely seen as more of a lifetime achievement award, since his performance had been criticized as over-the-top and hammy. In his Reader's Digest article on Wayne from October 1979, Ronald Reagan wrote that the award was both in recognition of his whole career, and to make up for him not receiving nominations for Red River (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956).
His performance as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) is ranked #23 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
His performance as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) is ranked #87 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time (2006).
His production company, Batjac, was originally to be called Batjak, after the shipping company owned by Luther Adler's character in the film Wake of the Red Witch (1948). A secretary's typo while she was drawing up the papers resulted in it being called Batjac, and Wayne, not wanting to hurt her feelings, kept her spelling of it.
His spoken album "America: Why I Love Her" became a surprise best-seller and Grammy nominee when it was released in 1973. Reissued on CD in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it became a best-seller all over again.
His TV appearances in the late 1960s showed that Wayne had overcome his indifference to television. In addition to appearing on "The Dean Martin Comedy Hour" (1965), "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour" (1969), he became a semi-regular visitor to "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" (1967), often good-naturedly spoofing his macho image and even dressing up as The Easter Bunny in a famous 1972 episode.
Holds the record for the actor with the most leading parts - 142. In all but 11 films he played the leading part.
Honored with an Army RAH-66 Helicopter, named "The Duke". Many people attended the naming ceremony in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, May 12th, 1998, including his children and grandchildren, congressmen, the president of the USO Metropolitan Washington, dignitaries and many military personnel. His eldest son Michael Wayne said at the ceremony, "John Wayne loved his country and he loved its traditions".
In 1920, lived at 404 N. Isabel Street, Glendale, California, according to U.S. Census.
In 1959 was considered for the role of the Sargent in The Big Red One. The role went to Lee Marvin in 1980 after Samuel Fuller asked John Wayne be replaced so as not to overshadow his film's story.
In 1960 Frank Sinatra hired a blacklisted screenwriter, Albert Maltz, to write an anti-war screenplay for a film called The Execution of Private Slovik (1974) (TV). Wayne, who had actively supported the McCarthy witch hunts for nearly twenty years, recalled, "When I heard about it, I was so goddamn mad I told a reporter, 'I wonder how Sinatra's crony, Senator John F. Kennedy, feels about Sinatra hiring such a man.' The whole thing became a minefield ... I heard that Kennedy put pressure on Frank and he had to back down ... He ended up paying Maltz $75,000 not to write the goddamn thing.". Consequently the film was not made for fourteen years.
In 1962 he was paid a record $250,000 for four days work on The Longest Day (1962), and in the following year he was paid the same amount for two days work on The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
In 1965, after his battle with lung cancer, Wayne moved out of Hollywood to Newport Beach, where he lived until his death 14 years later. His house was demolished after he died.
In 1967 Wayne wrote to Democratic President Lyndon Johnson requesting military assistance for his pro-war film about Vietnam. Jack Valenti told the President, "Wayne's politics are wrong, but if he makes this film he will be helping us." Wayne got enough firepower to make The Green Berets (1968), which became one of the most controversial movies of all time.
In 1971 he displayed a sense of humor when he appeared on "The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour" (1969) in his usual western screen costume, flashing the peace sign to the show's other guests that week, the then-hot rock band Three Dog Night.
In 1971 Wayne and James Stewart were traveling to Ronald Reagan's second inauguration as Governor of California when they encountered some anti-war demonstrators with a Vietcong flag. Stewart's stepson Ronald had been killed in Vietnam in 1969. Wayne walked over to speak to the protesters and within minutes the flag had been lowered.
In 1971, owing to the success of Big Jake (1971), Wayne was Number 1 at the US Box Office for the last time.
In 1973 Clint Eastwood wrote to Wayne, suggesting they star in a western together. Wayne wrote back an angry response criticizing the revisionist style and violence of Eastwood's latest western, High Plains Drifter (1973). Consequently Eastwood did not reply and no film was made.
In 1973 he was awarded the Gold Medal from the National Football Foundation for his days playing football for Glendale High School and USC.
In 1973 he was honored with the Veterans of Foreign Wars highest award - The National Americanism Gold Medal.
In 1974, with the Vietnam war still continuing, The Harvard Lampoon invited Wayne to The Harvard Square Theater to award him the "Brass Balls Award" for his "Outstanding machismo and a penchant for punching people". Wayne accepted and arrived riding atop an armored personnel carrier manned by the "Black Knights" of Troop D, Fifth Regiment. Wayne took the stage and ad-libbed his way through a series of derogatory questions with adroitness, displaying an agile wit that completely won over the audience of students.
In 1975, for the first time since his arrival in Hollywood 47 years earlier, he did not act in any movies. Production began in January of the following year for his last, The Shootist (1976).
In 1978, after recovering from open heart surgery, he had a script commissioned for a film called "Beau John" in which he would star with Ron Howard, but due to his declining health it never happened.
In 1979, as it became known that Wayne was dying of cancer, Barry Goldwater introduced legislation to award him the Congressional Gold Medal. Maureen O'Hara and Elizabeth Taylor flew to Washington to give testimony, and signed statements in support of the motion from Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Jack Lemmon, Kirk Douglas, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn were read out. The bill was passed unanimously, and the medal was presented to the Wayne family in the following year.
In a 1960 interview Wayne criticized the homosexual themes of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and They Came to Cordura (1959).
In December 1978, just a month before he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, he joined Bob Hope and Johnny Carson in offering his services to speak out publicly against government corruption, poverty, crime and drug abuse.
In his films Wayne often surrounded himself with a group of friends/fellow actors (often unknown names but recognized faces), such as Ward Bond, Jim Hutton, Bruce Cabot, Ben Johnson, Edward Faulkner, Jay C. Flippen, Richard Boone, Chuck Roberson and his son, Patrick Wayne.
In his later years John Wayne lived near Newport Beach, just south of Los Angeles where he had a beach house, and a yacht, The Wild Goose. His house has been torn down, but The Wild Goose sails on. It is now a tour boat offering dinner cruises to John Wayne fans young and old alike. Built from a retired Navy minesweeper, the custom interior of the yacht has polished wood almost everywhere you look. It was there that in his later years the Duke often entertained, hosting card games with his good friends Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and other big name stars of the time.
In his will were instructions that, because of his suffering from lung cancer, no film of him smoking should ever be shown again. The director of Thank You for Smoking (2005), Jason Reitman, had to petition Wayne's family in order to allow him to use a scene from Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in which Wayne's character, Sgt. Striker, survives the battle only to be killed by a sniper after lighting a cigarette. After showing them the script and describing to them what the movie was about the family agreed to allow the scene to be shown.
In November 2003 he once again commanded a top-ten spot in the annual Harris Poll asking Americans to name their favorite movie star. No other deceased star has achieved such ranking since Harris began asking the question in 1993. In a 2001 Gallup Poll, Americans selected Wayne as their favorite movie star of all time.
In the comic "Preacher", his ghost appears in several issues, clothed in his traditional gunfighter outfit, as a mentor to the hero of the series, Jesse Custer.
In the final years of his life, with the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War, Wayne's political beliefs appeared to have moderated. He attended the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter on 20 January 1977, and along with his fellow right-winger James Stewart he could be seen applauding Jane Fonda at AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Henry Fonda (1978) (TV). Later in 1978, Wayne uncharacteristically sided with the Democrats and President Carter against his fellow conservative Republicans over the issue of the Panama Canal, which Wayne believed belonged to the people of Panama and not the United States of America.
In the late 1970s Wayne made a series of commercials for the Great Western Savings Bank in Los Angeles. The day after the first one aired, a man walked into a GW Bank branch in West Hollywood with a suitcase, asked to see the bank manager, and when he was shown to the manager's desk, he opened up the suitcase to reveal $500,000 in cash. He said, "If your bank is good enough for John Wayne, it's good enough for me." He had just closed his business and personal accounts at a rival bank down the street and walked to the GW branch to open accounts there because John Wayne had endorsed it.
In the mid-1930s Wayne was hired by Columbia Pictures to make several westerns for its "B" unit. Columbia chief Harry Cohn, a married man, soon got the idea that Wayne had made a pass at a Columbia starlet with whom Cohn was having an affair. When he confronted Wayne about it Wayne denied it, but Cohn called up executives at other studios and told them that Wayne would show up for work drunk, was a womanizer and a troublemaker and requested that they not hire him. Wayne didn't work for several months afterward, and when he discovered what Cohn had done, he burst into Cohn's office at Columbia, grabbed him by the neck and threatened to kill him. After he cooled off he told Cohn that "as long as I live, I will never work one day for you or Columbia no matter how much you offer me." Later, after Wayne had become a major star, he received several lucrative film offers from Columbia, including the lead in The Gunfighter (1950), all of which he turned down cold. Even after Cohn died in 1958, Wayne still refused to entertain any offers whatsoever from Columbia Pictures, including several that would have paid him more than a a million dollars.
Increasingly by the early 1960s Wayne used to wear three or four-inch lifts in his shoes, a practice that mystified friends and co-stars like Bobby Darin's Capucine's and Robert Mitchum's because he stood 6'4". It was possibly due to his increasing weight, health problems, and age that he wasn't able to loom as tall without lifts.
Inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1974.
It was no surprise that Wayne would become such an enduring icon. By the early 1970s, his contemporaries Humphrey Bogart, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni and Gary Cooper were dead. James Cagney and Cary Grant both retired from acting at 62. The careers of other stars declined considerably - both Henry Fonda and James Stewart ended up working on television series which were canceled on them. Wayne however continued to star in movies until 1976, remaining one of the top ten stars at the US box office until 1974.
Just on his sheer popularity and his prominent political activism, the Republican party in 1968 supposedly asked him to run for President of the USA, even though he had no previous political experience. He turned them down because he did not believe America would take a movie star running for the President seriously. He did however support Ronald Reagan's campaigns for governor of California in 1966 and 1970, as well as his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.
Listed in the 1910 U.S. Census as Marion R. Morrison, living with his parents in Madison, Iowa.
Mentioned in many songs, including Jimmy Buffet's "Incommunicado", Tom Lehrer's "Send The Marines", Ray Stevens' "Beside Myself", Paula Cole's "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?", Queen's "Bicycle Race" and Bruce Dickinson's (of Iron Maiden fame) "Sacred Cowboys".
Most published sources refer to Wayne's birth name as Marion Michael Morrison. His birth certificate, however, gives his original name as Marion Robert Morrison. According to Wayne's own statements, after the birth of his younger brother in 1911, his parents named the newborn Robert Emmett and changed Wayne's name from Marion Robert to Marion Michael. It has also been suggested by several of his biographers that Wayne's parents actually changed his birth name from Marion Robert to Marion Mitchell. In "Duke: The Life and Times of John Wayne" (1985), Donald Shepherd and Robert F. Slatzer state that when Wayne's younger brother was born, "the Duke's middle name was changed from Robert to Mitchell. . . . After he gained celebrity, Duke deliberately confused biographers and others by claiming Michael as his middle name, a claim that had no basis in fact."
Of his many film roles, his personal favorite was that of Ethan Edwards from The Searchers (1956). Wayne even went so far as to name his son Ethan after that character.
Offered Charlton Heston the roles of Jim Bowie and Colonel William Travis in his film The Alamo (1960), saying the young actor would be ideal for either part. Heston declined the offer because he did not want to be directed by Wayne, and because he feared the critical response to the right-wing movie. Wayne intended the epic to be an allegory for America's Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Often stated how he wished his first Oscar nomination had been for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) instead of Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).
On 20 August 2007, the Republican Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced that Wayne will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts in Sacramento on 5 December 2007.
On Friday, January 12th, 1979, Wayne entered hospital for gall bladder surgery, which turned in a nine and a half hour operation when doctors discovered cancer in his stomach. His entire stomach was removed. On May 2nd, Wayne returned to the hospital, where the cancer was found to have spread to his intestines. He was taken to the 9th floor of the UCLA Medical Center, where President Jimmy Carter visited him, and Queen Elizabeth II sent him a get well card. He went into a coma on Sunday, June 10th, 1979, and died at 5:35 P.M., in the late afternoon the next day, Monday, June 11th, 1979.
On Monday, June 11th, 1979, the flame of the Olympic Torch at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, was lit for honoring him, in memory. It remained lit until the funeral four days later, Friday, June 15th, 1979.
On Monday, May 18th, 1953, during divorce proceedings from his second wife Esperanza Baur, Wayne's annual gross income was publicly revealed to be $502,891.