Why John Wayne was ashamed by his acting career: “There’s not much satisfaction in the job”
In the majority of cases, typecasting can be detrimental to an actor’s career, but if anything, John Wayne would have never become the iconic figure that he did if it wasn’t for his strict adherence to playing characters that stuck so rigidly to the archetype built around him.
He was of the belief that audiences wanted to see ‘The Duke’ and nobody else, so that’s precisely what he gave them. Wayne spent years carefully crafting, honing, and refining the persona that made him one of the biggest draws in Hollywood, which didn’t hold him back in the slightest when he became such an era-defining icon.
John Ford’s most famous collaborator turned down a number of roles that went on to become legendary in their own right, and the common thread uniting them was that none of them fit the criteria Wayne was adamant his fans deserved to see. He was a unique and very singular performer, but that in itself came with its own set of drawbacks.
Even if he wanted to branch out and try his hand at something completely different, those weren’t the sort of parts being offered his way because he’d spent so long existing only as ‘The Duke’ that directors, producers, or casting agents couldn’t conceive of him doing anything else.
Name one type of cinema to describe Wayne, and the answer is going to be the western all day long. Traversing those dusty plains brought him the greatest successes of his professional life, but the drawback was that he regularly found himself frustrated with dedicating so much of his life to a certain set of strict tropes, trappings, and parameters.
Per Maurice Zolotow’s biography Shooting Star, ‘The Duke’ once lamented that he’d become “sick” of westerns, with the star left wishing “he could be anybody but who he was.” Obviously, being who he was made him an A-list fixture for decades, but there’s no line of work in the world – no matter how much fame and fortune it brings – that yields nothing but 100% happiness from beginning to end.
Not that he viewed the western as being beneath him despite friend Zolotow suggesting “he was ashamed of westerns” and “hated himself during his black moods,” but the more time he spent in the business, the more he realised that maybe he’d stifled his own creativity somewhat.
“Not that I think I’m too good for westerns, but I’m getting to be something of a veteran in this business,” he remarked. “And if I don’t progress, there’s not much satisfaction in this job.”
The ideal time for Wayne to stretch himself would have been in his later years when the tide of cinema was shifting towards more provocative, intimate, and taboo-shattering stories. Unfortunately, ‘The Duke’ detested everything that Hollywood was becoming, and outside of a brief sojourn to the United Kingdom to shoot his one and only British film, he remained entrenched in the western until the very end.
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