Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros.

What was John Wayne’s first film role?

Thu 1 August 2024 16:09, UK

John Wayne came into his own as an actor starring in western films directed by John Ford and Howard Hawks in the 1940s. The likes of Red River, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande set the stage for his career-defining roles as Ethan Edwards the 1956 classic The Searchers, and Sheriff John T. Chance in 1959’s Rio Bravo.

Wayne’s working relationship with Ford actually went way back to bit-part roles in some of the director’s first experiments with synchronised sound in the late 1920s. Yet Ford wasn’t the director who gave the actor his initial berth in a movie, even though he did provide the helping hand the actor needed to make it in Hollywood.

Back in 1926, Wayne was looking for work using his real name, Marion Morrison, after losing a college sports scholarship due to a season-ending injury. His coach at the University of Southern Carolina was Howard Jones, a college football legend who was friends with one of Ford’s leading movie stars, Tom Mix. Mix recommended the young Wayne to Ford as a favour to Jones, and the college dropout got his foot in the door of filmmaking by carrying props around movie sets.

Then came his chance to appear on screen, ironically in a non-speaking part as a college football player in Brown of Harvard, directed by Jack Conway. This was one of two MGM productions that began Wayne’s film career, along with another uncredited role in Bardelys the Magnificent.

But what was Wayne’s first lead role?

Wayne didn’t receive a screen credit for any of the first 14 movies in which he appeared, including four directed by Ford. The first time his name appeared in a cast list was as ‘Duke Morrison’ for a minor role in James Tinling’s 1929 musical comedy Words and Music. It’s easy to imagine that this type of role didn’t exactly play to the 22-year-old actor’s strengths.

After six further uncredited appearances, Wayne finally got the part he needed to get his acting career off the ground. He played Breck Coleman, the lead role in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 western The Big Trail. Coleman is a fur trapper heading out west in pursuit of vengeance.

The character suited Wayne down to the ground, even if it had more of a romantic element to it than most of his later parts. Walsh was also responsible for giving Wayne the name we know him by, first calling him Anthony Wayne after the Revolutionary War general ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne, before it was decided he needed a single syllable first name, John.

Wayne didn’t actually enjoy his first starring role, and The Big Trail was a box office failure because of its release date, at the start of the Great Depression when many cinemas were closing down. But it started him on the path to success, beginning a career as one of the defining stars of the western genre.