The actor John Wayne thought would succeed him: “He’s taking over”
On April 9th, 1979, John Wayne turned up at the Academy Awards to hand out the gong for ‘Best Picture’. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter bagged the big prize that night, but for the Duke, the bit that stuck wasn’t the ceremony itself, it was a chance backstage run-in with a fresh-faced leading man just breaking through.
As he milled around backstage, preparing for his big moment to present the most prestigious award of any Hollywood year, Wayne wound up chatting to Cary Grant, another Old Hollywood icon. Grant hadn’t made a motion picture for 13 years by that point, while The Shootist, which would prove to be Wayne’s final film role, came out three years earlier.
Both men knew their legendary status from decades in the business was already secure, but their days as matinee idols were long gone. In the past, their star power and charisma convinced mass audiences to put down their hard-earned money to watch them on-screen, but in the ‘70s, their kind had been largely phased out by a new generation of hungry, passionate actors leading the charge for the New Hollywood era. The likes of Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Robert Redford were the John Wayne and Cary Grant of their day, and there was nothing the elder stars could do but watch them ascend.
That night carried extra weight, given that it was less than two months before Wayne would sadly lose his battle with stomach cancer. Backstage, though, the Duke clocked someone he reckoned could carry the torch after him. While talking to Grant, a six-foot-four fella with dark hair slicked back, sharp eyes, built like an athlete walked over to introduce himself with the confidence of a bloke who knew he belonged.
This was Christopher Reeve, the young actor who shot to stardom the previous year as the ‘Last Son of Krypton’ in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie. Bearing witness to his stature and charisma in real life must have impressed Wayne, because he turned to Grant and said, “This is our new man. He’s taking over.”
God only knows what must’ve been running through Reeve’s head at the moment. He’d only knocked out two films by then, and now Wayne went and dubbed him the next big thing in Hollywood. To get a nod like that from the Duke, a bloke who’d ruled the box office for half a century, must’ve been both a thrill and a proper scare for a young actor still trying to find his feet in the industry. Reeve was so humble at that time, in fact, that when he was asked during Superman’s first week of release how being a movie star made him feel, he replied with a bemused, “I don’t know. This is only the third day I’ve been one. Come back in a year, and I’ll tell you.”
Sadly, Wayne’s prediction that Reeve would succeed him as the biggest star in the business was ultimately proven to be only half right, at best. As Superman, of course, Reeve was forever immortalised in movie history, and he played the character in three sequels with varying degrees of success. To his dying day, he was Superman in the world’s eyes, for better or worse.
However, even before he suffered the tragic horse-riding accident in 1995 that paralysed him from the neck down, Reeve struggled to forge a real career outside of playing the world’s most famous superhero. If anything, in the ‘80s, he purposely took parts that distanced him from heroic leading men like Superman – and like his supposed predecessor Wayne – and this contributed to him never quite living up to such lofty predictions of superstardom.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out John Wayne Newsletter
All the latest stories about John Wayne from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.