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| Born As |
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Marion Michael Morrison |
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| Nick Name |
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Duke |
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| Sex |
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Male |
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| Height |
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6' 4˝" |
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| Nationality |
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US - United States of America |
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| Date of Birth |
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May 26, 1907 |
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| Place of Birth |
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Winterset, Iowa |
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| Date of Death |
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June 11, 1979 |
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| Place of Death |
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Los Angeles, California |
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Biography |
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(1907-1979), actor. Born Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, Wayne moved with his family to southern California in 1913. It was here that he acquired the nickname "Duke." In 1925, he entered the University of Southern California on a football scholarship. His coach arranged summer jobs for several of the players at Fox Film Studios, among them Duke Morrison. "My wages were thirty-five dollars a week," he later recalled. "My job was to lug furniture and props around."
His screen debut, as an unbilled stunt man in Brown of Harvard, came in 1926. The following summer, he and his teammate Ward Bond appeared in The Drop Kick. But it was in his capacity as a prop man at Fox that he first attracted the attention of John Ford. Beginning with Mother Machree (1928), Ford directed him in fourteen films over the years, including Stagecoach (1939), The Long Voyage (1940), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Searchers (1956). A father-son relationship developed between them that endured until Ford's death in 1973.
In 1930, another Fox director, Raoul Walsh, was casting The Big Trail. When Gary Cooper refused the leading role, Ford suggested his protégé. "To be a cowboy star," Walsh contended, "you've got to be six-foot-three or over, have no hips, and a face that looks right under a sombrero." Another stipulation was a "manly" name, and for The Big Trail, Marion Michael Morrison was given the nom-de-film John Wayne.
The Big Trail launched Wayne as a leading man, but Fox did not renew his contract. For the next nine years, he toiled in a long succession of B-movies. In a 1932 serial, Singing Sandy, Wayne achieved a dubious distinction--he became Hollywood's first singing cowboy. But Stagecoach rescued his career. It was, he later said, "my passport to fame."
Although mainly identified with westerns (he made over eighty in all), Wayne made a significant contribution to yet another distinctly American genre: the war movie. From John Ford's Men without Women (1929) to his most propagandistic picture The Green Berets (1968), Wayne appeared in seventeen war movies. As a rule, the setting was World War II--America's last "good" war. Most of these films--and, beginning with Red River (1948), his westerns as well--are characterized by a generational plot: Wayne, as either charismatic leader or unabashedly patriotic role model, guides the younger generation through its rite of passage to responsible adulthood.
Wayne's portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit earned for him the 1970 Academy Award, and was, in the words of critic Richard Schickel, "the true climax of a great and well-beloved career, if not as an actor, then as an American institution." His last film, The Shootist (1976), was on the order of an epitaph. In it, he plays an aging gunfighter who is dying of cancer, an illness that Wayne himself succumbed to three years later.
Of all the tributes to John Wayne, perhaps the most fitting was Vincent Canby's in the New York Times: "Mr. Wayne's extraordinary physique, along with his particular grace of movement and self-assurance of style, gave weight to minor movies and certified the authenticity of the great ones, to such an extent that we eventually came to see the myth as the man."
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