Five movie stars who hate John Wayne: “You must have been a real bastard”
While the cinematic achievements of John Wayne are undoubted, having seen the Academy Award-winner give fine performances in the likes of Stagecoach, The Searchers and True Grit, it’s fair to say that The Duke possessed a public persona that undoubtedly detracted from his on-screen brilliance.
Time and time again, Wayne mouthed off with his right-wing views and racist opinions, leading to a divisive nature when it came to his overall assessment. Sure, Wayne delivered some of Western cinema’s greatest moments, but he largely tarnished his reputation by essentially being one of the film industry’s biggest pieces of shit.
There were also several occasions on which Wayne offered his damning assessments of his fellow movie industry figures, showing that the person he really cared about the most was himself. Naturally, this led some of the other actors of Wayne’s era to come to an equally scathing conclusion about his personal qualities.
We’ve compiled a list of the actors who seemed to have no time for Wayne, either as an actor on the screen or as a man away from it. From modern legends to classic Hollywood heroes, here are the five actors who hated The Duke the most.
The five film icons who detest John Wayne:
Daniel Day-Lewis
Known as one of the greatest actors of all time, certainly in a contemporary sense, Daniel Day-Lewis is also a star who had no time for Wayne’s performances. The western film genre is not something we associate with Day-Lewis, but the truth is that he enjoyed his fair share of them growing up.
According to Day-Lewis, he had enjoyed the work of Clint Eastwood and Gary Cooper, particularly concerning the latter’s effort in High Noon. However, Day-Lewis once remarked in The New York Times, “I do not like John Wayne: I find it hard to watch him. I just never took to him.” Thankfully for Wayne, The Duke had passed long before Day-Lewis made his comments.
Gene Hackman
If there was one actor that John Wayne himself seemed to despise, then it was truly Gene Hackman. According to Wayne’s daughter, Aissa, whenever Hackman would appear on screen, he would offer his most scathing critique and pretty much “skewer his performance” every single time.
Only someone with the resolve of Jesus Christ might have been able to withstand the constant bashing of The Duke, and while Hackman indeed resisted ever calling out Wayne for his one-dimensional performances and racist, right-wing political views, it’s undoubted that The French Connection actor truly despised his fellow star who’d constantly issued such vile critique.
Katharine Hepburn
Here’s an instance of one of Wayne’s many co-stars discovering what a nightmare the actor could be. The iconic Katharine Hepburn appeared with Wayne in the sequel to True Grit, Rooster Cogburn, but the production of the movie seemed to be heading into disaster, with Wayne criticising pretty much everyone on the film’s set, including director Stuart Miller.
Before long, Hepburn took it upon herself to offer her opinion of Wayne in no uncertain terms. At the wrap party for the film, Hepburn stormed up to Wayne, who had been living with one lung after suffering a bout of pneumonia, and told him, “I’m glad I didn’t know you when you had two lungs; you must have been a real bastard. Losing a hip has mellowed me, but you!”
Clark Gable
The moustachioed King of Hollywood, Clark Gable, was another star who Wayne had frequently disrespected, going as far as to brandish the Gone with the Wing actor as “too stupid” to do anything but act. Eventually, the pair came to loggerheads concerning the 1953 John Ford movie Mogambo, which seemed like a wholly bad idea considering Wayne’s affiliation with Ford.
The resulting film was a decent effort, but Ford and Gable repeatedly clashed. Naturally, Wayne was a longstanding ally of Ford, so he did everything he could to stand by his frequent director. By the time Mogambo was completed, Wayne had a damning assessment of Gable and Gable himself had grown completely embittered of The Duke.
Marlon Brando
At the 1973 Oscars, Native American actor Sacheen Littlefeather arrived at the podium to turn down Marlon Brando’s award for ‘Best Actor’. Brando had rejected the Academy Award in order to protest against the mistreatment of Native Americans in the film industry, which naturally drew spite from Wayne, who had appeared in several exploitative Western movies throughout his career.
Following Littlefeather’s speech, Wayne had accosted the actor backstage and “had to be restrained by six security men” who stopped his “physical assault”. Wayne felt that Brando had disrespected not only the Academy Awards but his entire filmography, but that was little compared to the kind of contempt that Brando had held for Wayne’s efforts on screen in the first place.
