John Wayne’s favourite British actors of all time: “Those guys really know a thing or two”
Despite being about as American as an American actor has ever been, to the point he probably bled red, white, and blue, John Wayne still appreciated what his colleagues from across the pond brought to the table.
When ‘The Duke’ was in the midst of his decades-long stint as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, the differences between British and American acting were as vast as they were stark, especially once Marlon Brando came along and dropped a performative hand grenade on Stateside thespianism.
The majority of actors from the United Kingdom who moved over to Hollywood had cut their teeth performing the classics on the stage, with virtually every single one of the most famous from Wayne’s era having honed their skills with Shakespeare before setting their sights on conquering Tinseltown.
Once Brando had revolutionised the craft, the method began to take precedence among those born and bred in the States, and it’s fair to say that Wayne would have been crap at both. He didn’t care for method acting, and he wasn’t committed enough to do it anyway, and the idea of him trying his hand at Shakespeare is undeniably hilarious; ‘To be or not to be, pilgrim,’ and all that.
Still, he’d been around long enough to work with his fair share of British exports, and some stuck in his memory better than others. When ‘The Duke’ named his five favourite actors of all time, two of them were from the UK, and almost anyone with eyes and ears would agree that Laurence Olivier and Elizabeth Taylor were deserving of being ranked among the best of the best.
Two other British locals wormed their way into his heart, though, and one of them was Wayne’s polar opposite in almost every way. He was the personification of onscreen Americana, a hard-drinking, hard-living cowboy who always saved the day and got the girl, while Richard Attenborough was the quintessential well-to-do British gentleman.
They worked together on 1975’s Brannigan, which was Wayne’s only British film, and he couldn’t be happier with the star who played the stiff-upper-lipped British police commander to his brash out-of-towner who descended on London to take the law into his own hands to solve a case.
“I love the way he calls everyone ‘darling’ and sweetie,'” he marvelled. “Just cracks me up. I like working with English, I should say British, actors.” To illustrate his point, ‘The Duke’ pointed to another that he’d only worked with once on The Alamo, but who left a long-lasting impression nonetheless.
“Like Laurence Harvey,” he continued. “These guys really know a thing or two about acting. Richard is my kind of movie actor. He doesn’t go in for all that violent stuff and nudity. His films are the kind you can go to see without being afraid you’ll get embarrassed because you’ve got your kid with you. He comes across as all upper-crust, but he’s got a wonderful sense of humour.”
Wayne shared the screen with a lot of Brits, but he couldn’t see past Olivier, Taylor, Attenborough, and Harvey as the cream of the crop.
