John Wayne got his screen name while moving studio furniture
Prop boy Marion Morrison never sat in on the naming meeting. Director Raoul Walsh floated Anthony Wayne after the Revolutionary general; Fox chief Winfield Sheehan called it too Italian, then approved John Wayne. Pay rose to one hundred five dollars a week for The Big Trail.
Born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa—thirteen pounds per the local paper—he grew up in Glendale, California with Airedale Terrier Duke, earning the lifelong nickname. USC football under Howard Jones ended after a collarbone break he blamed on bodysurfing; the lost scholarship pushed him into Fox lots. Tom Mix and John Ford hired the tall extra; Walsh cast him in the 1930 widescreen epic The Big Trail, a 1.25-million-dollar spectacle that failed commercially because few theatres could show Grandeur 70 mm.
Roughly eighty Poverty Row Westerns followed. With stuntman Yakima Canutt he refined fight choreography that let heroes brawl dirty—chairs and lamps included—instead of polite knockdowns. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), financed independently with Claire Trevor billed above him, made the B-movie rider an A-list star. Later landmarks included Red River, The Searchers, The Quiet Man with Maureen O’Hara, and True Grit (1969), which finally won Best Actor.
Exempt from World War II service by age and family status, he sought OSS work unsuccessfully, toured USO bases, and carried a Donovan assessment request in the Pacific—later memorialized with an OSS certificate. One hundred seventy-nine film and television credits stretched into The Shootist (1976). Last seen publicly at the April 9, 1979 Oscars, he died of stomach cancer June 11, 1979; a Presidential Medal of Freedom followed in 1980. The AFI listed him among classic Hollywood’s greatest male stars in 1999.
Source: John Wayne
