The one performance John Wayne always regretted: “I was useless in the goddamn picture”
Was John Wayne a good actor? It’s a simple question, albeit one that’s caused endless debate for almost a century. He was the best at playing John Wayne, that’s for sure, but he wasn’t one for stretching himself.
He’s an Academy Award-winning actor, but even at the time, there were suggestions that his ‘Best Actor’ win for True Grit was more of a lifetime achievement prize than an accolade handed out purely on merit. He was the best at what he did, even if what he mostly did was be himself, and while he’s undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars, he’s never been regarded as one of its finest-ever performers.
Even when he was in bad films, and there were quite a lot of them, ‘The Duke’ rarely voiced his regrets about his own performances. There were roles he regretted turning down, like Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, and he rejected the chance to appear in stone-cold classics like Dr Strangelove, Blazing Saddles, and High Noon for personal or political reasons.
There were also movies he wished he’d never made, co-stars he didn’t get along with, contemporaries he couldn’t stand, and directors he’d refuse to work with under any circumstances, but hearing Wayne lambast his own acting was about as rare an occurrence in the ‘Golden Age’ as any, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
When John Ford called, ‘The Duke’ would usually come running. He had far too much respect for the man he referred to as either ‘Pappy’ or ‘Coach’ to say no, even when he knew he was staring a loser square in the face. His mentor and friend wanted to hire him for a part, and even though he knew from the beginning that he was the worst possible guy to play it, he did it anyway.
He didn’t convince himself otherwise, telling Peter Bogdanovich that Ford’s 1963 adventure caper, Donovan’s Reef, was a low point. “Me, I was useless in the goddamn picture,” he said. “I figured I was too old to play this part. I was never satisfied with it. I don’t know, just something lacking. But not for the picture, for me. I didn’t give something to the picture.”
Very rarely will an actor playing a character they know they’re ill-suited for deliver a performance that changes their own mind, and Wayne was no different. He was adamant that he was too long in the tooth to be Michael ‘Guns’ Donovan, especially when his love interest, Elizabeth Allen’s Amelia Dedham, was portrayed by someone more than 20 years his junior.
Donovan’s Reef made money, as was the custom whenever ‘The Duke’ and his favourite director partnered up for a new feature, but it’s nowhere close to being in the upper echelons of their shared filmography. Because he’d been approached by his favourite eye patch-wearing maverick, Wayne felt as though he couldn’t say no, and through the entirety of shooting, he knew fine well that he was miscast, which did at least mean he wasn’t disappointed by the results.
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