John Wayne lived a long and colorful life with a career that spanned an incredible 50 years. Over the course of his remarkable life, he became something more than just an actor or a celebrity. In a career that spanned 6 decades, he became a legend, Ever sturdy, John Wayne’s legend endures.
Biography
John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907.
When he was a boy, his family moved West settling in Lancaster, California and later Glendale, California where he would come to be known as Duke. Marion’s dog, an Airedale, was named Duke, and soon the local Glendale firefighters started calling Marion Duke, too. Duke’s academic and athletic success at Glendale High led to a football scholarship at the University of Southern California (USC).
A body surfing accident at Newport Beach cut short his promising athletic career, so the former tackle looked to studio work to help pay his tuition. In a film called The Big Trail, Marion Morrison became John Wayne, and the movie business – and the country – would never be the same.
John Wayne’s monumental film career spanned five decades. He appeared in more than 175 films, more than a dozen directed by John Ford alone. For an entire generation, he was Hollywood’s biggest and most durable box-office star. Incredibly versatile, Wayne starred in just about every genre Hollywood offered: war movies, romantic comedies, police dramas, histories. But it was the Western – the American cinema – where Wayne made his most lasting mark. He was nominated three times for the Academy Award, winning the Oscar for Best Actor in 1969 for True Grit. And his powerful performance in The Searchers has been singled out by filmmakers and actors alike as the greatest performance by an actor on film, ever.
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