Credit: Far Out / Monogram Pictures Corporation

The one actor John Wayne said he would “crawl over the mountains on my hands and knees” to work with

Mon 13 April 2026 16:45, UK

Since he was arguably the single biggest star of his era and one of the most recognisable actors on the planet, you’d think that if John Wayne set his sights on a potential co-star, it was a sure thing.

Few leading men carried as much clout in Hollywood as ‘The Duke’, who frequently had approval of the director, script, and ensemble cast before he’d sign on the dotted line. Despite that, even he had one that got away, and he couldn’t have made it much clearer how desperate he was to work with them.

One of the drawbacks that came with being John Wayne was that every film he starred in was effectively a John Wayne film. Most of them followed the same set of tropes and narrative beats, which made some of his fellow ‘Golden Age’ heavyweights reluctant to play second fiddle, with Charlton Heston just one example.

‘The Duke’ shared the screen with some of the most prominent female stars of his era, including Maureen O’Hara, Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, and Sophia Loren, but there was another who remained perpetually out of reach. To add insult to injury, one of his friends worked with them twice.

In 1965, Rod Taylor and Doris Day headlined the romantic comedy Do Not Disturb, and with their chemistry powering the picture to profits at the box office, they almost instantly reunited for the next year’s spy caper, The Glass Bottom Boat. They don’t sound like two films that Wayne would be jealous of, but he was.

When ‘The Duke’ asked Taylor what his next role would be, he replied by saying, “The second of two pictures with Doris Day,” which set the western icon off. “Jesus Christ!” he responded. “I would crawl over the mountains of Beverly Hills on my hands and knees if I could do a movie with Doris Day!”

By the mid-60s, the rom-com wasn’t something anyone would associate with Wayne, not least of all the man himself, who’d already admitted that he was getting too long in the tooth to be playing a lothario who chased after younger women, which he recognised was the kind of thing that only Cary Grant could pull off.

He was only 15 years older than Day, to be fair, which would have been a smaller age gap than some of his previous onscreen paramours, but Taylor suspected that one of the main reasons he craved the chance to work with her was to upend the image he’d created for himself that he’d been typecast in for years.

“All that macho bullshit, all those men’s men that he played, and what he really wanted was for someone to offer him a romantic comedy,” he theorised. ‘The Duke’ was too much of a manly man to admit as much, but Taylor was convinced that his desire to collaborate with Day was driven as much by the genre as it was by her talent. Did he get his wish? Nope, they never made a movie together.