John Wayne’s career made him one of the most famous actors of all time. The star of “True Grit” started his career in a completely different field, but he went on to become the biggest movie star of his time.
John Wayne was a well-known family man who also starred in many movies. He married three times and had seven kids from those marriages. And while some actors’ kids remember their parents not being around when they were growing up, John Wayne was not one of them.
Since his sad death, some of his kids have talked about him in public, letting everyone know the truth. Here’s everything you need to know about John Wayne, including how his life ended in tragedy.
John Wayne wasn’t really his birth name. Instead, the famous entertainer was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa, as Marion Morrison. His first “name change” happened when he was young. It was because his parents, Clyde and Mary, had an Airedale dog named Duke.
“There’s a picture of him in the book. He looked like he weighed about 80 pounds, and Marion was called Little Duke. Biographer Scott Eyman said, “He liked the name, and for the rest of his life, he always insisted that people call him Duke.”
When Wayne was 9 or 10, his family made the decision to move to Glendale, California. His dad started working there as a pharmacist, but the family ran into a lot of problems along the way. Simply put, it turned out that it wasn’t easy to make it in California. In the end, John Wayne got to see a lot of things that helped him become the person he is today.
Just because of this, his time there probably helped him a lot in the long run.
“There’s this young boy whose father is sick, and he and his family move to the Mojave Desert in the west to try to farm. Wayne’s father, Ethan, said of his father’s childhood, “That’s a hard place to farm, and they fail, and he has a very tough, demanding mother.”
“It’s hard on the dad, and he’s never happy about it. And they end up in Glendale, which was another small town in the country at the time. The father was friendly, and the mother was a bit of a taskmaster. I think [John] found comfort in school and the people he met there.”
John went to Glendale High School, which is where he first got interested in acting. Among other things, he played football and did well in his classes. He also took part in student theater productions.
He was the head editor of the school newspaper, he led the debate team, and he was in the dance committee and the drama club.
Wayne was also the captain of the football team. He led the team to a championship season and got a football scholarship to the University of Southern California. At first, he was a good student, but school was expensive, so he dropped out and went to work. Obviously, that wasn’t the only reason he gave up on going to college.
No, it looked like young John Wayne was going to be an NFL player. He was good at what he did and wanted to get better, but in 1926, he hurt himself while bodysurfing.
So, Wayne got a job at a local movie studio, where he worked both as a prop man and as an extra in a few movies. There, he met some of the most important people in the movie business, like John Ford, who taught him a lot.
“I was a juicer and a carpenter. I set up lights and helped put together sets. moved things. Furniture was moved. “I learned the nuts and bolts of making movies,” Wayne said, as quoted in John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman.
Wayne first worked with the aforementioned Ford on the set of the 1928 movie Mother Machree. His job was to herd geese. Since he had worked at the studio for a while, a lot of people knew who he was. One of these people was director Raoul Walsh, who gave John his first job. At the time, John was still known as Marion Morrison.
Soon after, he got the lead role in the 1930 movie The Big Trail, and it was on the set of that movie that his name would change forever.
“Winfield Sheehan, who ran Fox Studios, was a big fan of ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne, a Revolutionary War general. That’s where the name ‘Wayne’ came from. The name ‘John’ came up in conversation because it seemed to fit with ‘Wayne’: ‘John Wayne.’ It was well put together.”
From then on, Marion, whose family called him “Duke,” was known as John Wayne. It was also the start of one of the most famous careers in the history of movies.
Wayne made a bunch of great movies after that. First, he was in the classic movie Stagecoach, which came out in 1939. In the 1950s, he had more hits like The Quiet Man, Rio Bravo, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He was in the movie True Grit in 1969.
Even though John Wayne became famous quickly, John didn’t think of himself as a big star. Instead, he always thought that “Duke Morrison” and “John Wayne” were two different people in the same body.
In 1957, Wayne said, “The guy you see on the screen isn’t really me.”
“My name is Duke Morrison, and I was never and will never be a movie star like John Wayne. I really know him. I’m one of the students he knows best. I’ve got to be. I get my money from him.”
These days, a lot of actors get ready for roles by trying to be the character they will play. A big part of playing someone else is being true to that person, so a good actor will want to know everything about their role.
This wasn’t the only way John Wayne did things. Eyman said that he always insisted that people call him by the nickname he had as a child, Duke.
Eyman wrote in the autobiography, “In Wayne’s own mind, he was Duke Morrison.” “John Wayne was to him what the Tramp was to Charlie Chaplin: a character that overlapped his own personality, but not so much that it took over.”
In 1975, he said, “I’ve always been Duke, Marion, or John Wayne.” “It’s a good combination of names, and it sounds like one word: JohnWayne.”
John also got married and had a child after his film career took off. His personal life, on the other hand, was full of twists and turns.
In 1933, he married Josephine Wayne and had four children with her: Patrick, Mary, Michael, and Melinda. After 12 years, they broke up, and the next year Wayne married his second wife, Esperanza Baur. The two of them were married for eight years.
Wayne got married for the third time in 1954. He got married to the Peruvian actress Pilar Pallet, and they had three kids: Aissa, Ethan, and Marisa. They were together until he died.
Having a famous Hollywood actor as a father must have been a very different experience for his children. Wayne, on the other hand, never thought he was better than anyone.
Patrick, one of his youngest children, talked about what his father was like in an interview with Jeremy Roberts in 2017.
John Wayne’s last movie and cancer
“My dad was one of those people who made a big impression just by being there. He could walk into a room and make everyone stop what they were doing. In the same way, he could make you feel totally at ease and relaxed in just five minutes. He was naturally charming and easy to get along with, he said.
Patrick’s friends didn’t think it was a big deal that his father was John Wayne.
“They knew my name and the name of my dad. “In a way, my dad was also getting bigger and more important,” he said. “Getting more and more popular. All of my close friends were going through the same thing.”
Even though John Wayne may have been at the top of his game as a movie star, doctors told him some bad news.
Wayne was told he had lung cancer in 1964. He had his left lung and four ribs taken out, and there was a time when it looked like he might get better. But the movie star didn’t stop smoking or chewing tobacco, which couldn’t have helped.
John Wayne was in The Shootist, which came out in 1976. It turned out to be his last movie, and the actor’s health quickly got worse in the years after it came out. Aissa, his daughter, said she could hardly watch it.
Wayne had died many times in the movies that came before. The Shootist, on the other hand, was different for Aissa.
“In this movie, he had cancer and was dying, which was very scary,” wrote Aissa in the book John Wayne: My Father.
“Cancer was always a worry for us, even if it wasn’t quite a family curse. By the time of The Shootist, my uncle Bob had died from the disease, and I’d been afraid that my dad would get cancer again ever since. Even though he didn’t find out he had cancer for another two years, I think my dad felt the same way when he made “The Shootist.”
By 1978, John Wayne’s voice was getting worse, so he couldn’t work. He did everything he could to hide it, but his cancer had come back. John Wayne died at the age of 79 on June 11, 1979. History.com says that stomach cancer was the official cause of his death.
When the cancer was found, the actor was too weak for chemotherapy and other experimental treatments, the doctors said.
John Wayne died in Los Angeles, California, at the UCLA Medical Center. He spent his last days in and out of consciousness, surrounded by family, until he died.
Final words
John Wayne is often thought of as a big, tough Western hero and a perfect example of a man, but he also had a sweet side.
When Wayne died, his daughter Aissa was in his bed. When she held his father’s hand and asked him if he knew who she was, he said some beautiful last words.
“Of course I recognize you. You’re my girl. Aissa remembered her father telling her, “I love you.”
Wayne was buried in Newport Beach, California, at the Pacific View Memorial Park Cemetery. It’s on a beautiful hillside with a view of the ocean, but for decades, no one knew exactly where it was.
A piece in the LA Times says that for years, no one knew where his grave was. Fans couldn’t go to his funeral because guards kept them out, so it was a private event. His grave was forgotten for twenty years.
