How John Wayne created his own legend: “I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability”
There was almost a decade and a half between the screen debut of John Wayne and the movie that turned him into a mainstream star, but once he’d struck that gold, the actor was determined to never let go of the position he’d toiled so hard to attain in the first place.
It would be an understatement to say he achieved that goal, considering ‘The Duke’ was one of the most famous faces on the planet during his lengthy stint at the top of the Hollywood A-list, and even to this day, he remains one of the most iconic faces in mainstream American cinema.
That was hardly the case when he was an uncredited background player in dozens of genre films, though, while his first major starring role in 1930’s The Big Trail failed at the box office. It wasn’t until he was partnered up with John Ford for the first time on Stagecoach nine years later that he secured his genuine breakthrough, and the two would go on to become virtually inseparable to go down in history as one of the industry’s greatest-ever recurring pairings of actor and director.
Wayne was disenchanted with what the western genre was becoming when he was on his way up, and he grew similarly disillusioned with what it was becoming when he was on the way back down as Clint Eastwood took over his status as the medium’s most famous figurehead, but there was a sweet spot right in the middle ‘The Duke’ was planning to make his own.
The star was famed for rarely showing any sort of noticeable weakness on-screen, hardly ever being killed off on-screen, dripping pure Americana from every pore, and maintaining his tough guy persona at virtually all times. That was hardly an accident, with Wayne having a very clear trajectory that he’d mapped out long before he reached the summit of cinema.
“I made up my mind that I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability,” he said. “I felt many of the western stars of the 1920s and 1930s had been too goddamn perfect.” From his perspective, they were too clean-cut and wholesome, something he sought to rectify when he began to reshape the western in his own image.
“They never drank or smoked, they never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl, they never had a fight,” Wayne explained, before outlining why he was so invested in breaking the mould. “I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible, but will fight dirty if he has to.”
That’s basically ‘The Duke’ in a nutshell, with the mythology that gradually enveloped him the longer his career went on being entirely by design. In his own words, “You could say I made the Western hero a roughneck,” which he did to the point that he’s the first name that comes to mind whenever the genre’s golden years are brought up.