John Wayne’s frustration at playing “damn few” memorable roles
Any movie that convinced John Wayne to sign on the dotted line was going to get John Wayne, the persona and personality that had become so deeply embedded in the fabric of Americana it still hasn’t been washed out.
After all, he was ‘The Duke’, the gunslinging face of an entire genre who’d become a worldwide superstar by developing, curating, and fine-tuning a mythology that followed him everywhere he went. At times, his star power overshadowed his abilities as an actor, and Wayne was growing increasingly suspicious that filmmakers were starting to make a habit out of it.
By the late 1960s, Wayne was regularly railing against the direction Hollywood was heading in, and part of that may have been down to the realisation he may not have a place in it. He wouldn’t have known he’d be dead less than a decade later, obviously, but ‘The Duke’ nonetheless bore umbrage with being a regular presence in movies who was rarely handed the most substantial part in any given picture.
He blamed Howard Hawks for the typecasting, which more and more directors tended to fall in line with. “Everybody else in the picture gets to have funny little scenes, clever lines, but I’m the hero so I stand there,” he lamented. “Howard Hawks worked out a whole system based on that, he’d just stand me up as a target and run everybody at me.”
Not even friend and mentor John Ford was safe, with his words laced with more than a light trace of jealousy. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” he told Roger Ebert matter-of-factly. “They had Lee Marvin as the colourful heavy, and that young Irish fellow playing the intellectual, and Andy Devine playing the best friend, and Jimmy Stewart to get a laugh kicking the horse crap out of his way, and what was left?”
‘The Duke’ knew he was a star, and he was repeatedly cast as the focal point, but that wasn’t everything he wanted out of acting. “I haven’t been short in good roles in terms of starring roles, but I’ve gotten damn few roles you get your teeth into and develop a character,” he suggested before dropping yet another title that left him playing a one-note protagonist.
“Look at The Quiet Man,” Wayne offered. “Everybody was a character but me. For three-fourths of the movie I had to keep alive, just walking through it.” Most folks in the business would have killed to be in his position, but once he reached it and stayed there for a while, it sounded as if even ‘The Duke’ was starting to grow bored of it.
People went to see Wayne’s movies to watch him be himself, or at least the idealised version of himself that became such a major part of cinema history. If anything, he boxed himself into that corner by being so big a star, which meant opportunities to try something radically different became few and far between.
