The star John Wayne called “the best actor in the business” forced him to confront his mortality
Was John Wayne a genuinely good actor, or was Marion Morrison just really good at playing John Wayne? It’s a straightforward question, albeit one with an incredibly complicated answer.
While it’s true that ‘The Duke’ specialised in playing himself under various guises for most of his career as a top-line leading man and box office draw, he was also an Academy Award-winning performer who lived right in the middle of the never-ending debate over whether he was underrated or overrated.
On one side of the coin, Wayne came under frequent criticism for refusing to venture outside of his comfort zone, and when he did, he ended up with things like The Conqueror. However, he knew exactly what he was doing, and the promise of a John Wayne movie was something he believed his audience was entitled to.
On the other side of that coin, enough of the directors and co-stars he worked with over the years publicly defended his range and dramatic heft to suggest that it wasn’t all about the persona, and that there was a gifted thespian under all the bluster, showmanship, and archetypal Wayne-isms.
Few figures in Hollywood history have ever applied the ‘if it ain’t broke’ approach more stringently than ‘The Duke’, and he had one major thing in common with the ‘Golden Age’ icon he believed was the best that the industry had to offer, although they differed from each other in another, more notable, way.
Wayne went out on a limb and appointed Cary Grant as “the best actor in the business,” and while it wasn’t a secret that he loathed the Marlon Brando-inspired rise of the method, it speaks volumes that ‘The Duke’ pinpointed another name who was often accused of “supposedly playing themselves” as the pinnacle.
Much like Marion Morrison became John Wayne, Archie Leach became Cary Grant, and in both cases, the latter consumed every aspect of their existence. The latter admitted that he had no idea who Cary Grant was, other than a construct he’d built for himself to turn a Bristol-born lad into a Tinseltown superstar.
When he was gearing up to make his directorial debut on The Alamo, Wayne also invoked Grant’s name to confront his own mortality. “My problem is that I’m not a handsome man like Cary Grant, who will be handsome at 65,” he said. “I may be able to do a few more man/woman things before it’s too late, but then what?”
Even as the biggest star of his era, Wayne acknowledged that he’d “never want to play silly old men chasing young girls, as some of the stars are doing.”
Grant was famed for age-gap onscreen romances that ran into the decades, but because he was Cary Grant, he could just about get away with it. A middle-aged ‘Duke’ romancing a woman in her 20s? He didn’t want to see that, and he didn’t think his fans would, either, so he intentionally avoided those parts as he got older, accepting the limitations of his age.
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