Wissenswertes

After meeting the late Superman - Der Film (1978) star Christopher Reeve at the 1979 Academy Awards, Wayne turned to Cary Grant and said, "This is our new man. He's taking over".

Directed most of Die Comancheros (1961) because credited director Michael Curtiz was dying of cancer and was often too ill to work. Wayne refused to be credited as a co-director.

One evening before a shoot he was trying to get some sleep in a Las Vegas hotel. The suite directly below his was that of Frank Sinatra, who was having a party. The noise kept Wayne awake, and each time he made a complaining phone call the noise quieted temporarily only to eventually grow louder again. Wayne then appeared at Sinatra's door and told him to stop the noise. A bodyguard of Wayne's size approached saying, "Nobody talks to Mr. Sinatra that way." Wayne looked at the man, turned as though to leave, then backhanded the bodyguard, who fell to the floor, where Wayne knocked him out by crashing a chair on top of him. The party noise stopped immediately.

Holds the record for the actor with the most leading parts - 142. In all but 11 films he played the leading part.

Lauren Bacall once recalled that while Wayne hardly knew her husband Humphrey Bogart at all, he was the first to send flowers and good wishes after Bogart was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in January 1956.

He considered Maureen O'Hara one of his best friends; over the years he was more open to her than anyone. When asked about her he always replied, "The greatest guy I ever knew." They were friends for 39 years, from 1940 until his death in 1979. Today she is considered by many to be his best leading lady; they starred in five films together. She referred to a wing in her home as the "John Wayne Wing".

In 1979, as it became known that he was dying of cancer, Barry Goldwater introduced legislation to award him the Congressional Gold Medal. Maureen O'Hara and Elizabeth Taylor flew to Washington to give testimony, and signed statements in support of the motion from Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Jack Lemmon, Kirk Douglas, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn were read out. The bill was passed unanimously, and the medal was presented to the Wayne family the following year.

Made three movies with Kirk Douglas, despite the fact that the two had very different political ideologies. Wayne was a very conservative Republican while Douglas was a very liberal Democrat. Wayne criticized Douglas for playing Vincent van Gogh in Vincent van Gogh - Ein Leben in Leidenschaft (1956), and publicly criticized him for hiring blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the "Hollywood Ten", to write the screenplay for Spartacus (1960). Douglas later praised Wayne as a true professional who would work with anybody if he felt they were right for the part. The two avoided discussing politics during the making of the films they worked on together.

After seeing Wayne's performance in Panik am roten Fluß (1948), directed by rival director Howard Hawks, John Ford is quoted as saying, "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act."

Of his many film roles, his personal favorite was that of Ethan Edwards from Der schwarze Falke (1956). Wayne even went so far as to name his son Ethan after that character.

On 1/12/79 he entered the hospital for gall bladder surgery, which turned into a 9.5-hour operation when doctors discovered cancer in his stomach. His entire stomach was removed. On May 2 Wayne returned to the hospital, where the cancer was found to have spread to his intestines. He was taken to the ninth floor of the UCLA Medical Center, where President Jimmy Carter visited him, and Queen Elizabeth II sent him a get well card. He went into a coma on June 10 and died at 5:35 P.M. the next day.

Was buried in secret and the grave went unmarked until 1999, in case Vietnam War protesters desecrated it. Twenty years after his death he finally received a headstone made of bronze, which was engraved with this quotation: "Tomorrow is the most Important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.".

He appeared in at least one film for every year from 1926-76, a record of 51 consecutive years. He did not act in a movie in 1975, though both Brannigan - Ein Mann aus Stahl (1975) and Mit Dynamit und frommen Sprüchen (1975) were released in that year.

On 6/11/79 the flame of the Olympic Torch at the Coliseum in Los Angeles was lit for honoring him, in memory. It remained lit until the funeral four days later.

Aa a young man, Ethan Wayne was never allowed to leave the house without carrying cards that his father had autographed to hand out to fans.

According to Mel Brooks in his commentary of Der wilde wilde Westen (1974), he wanted Wayne as The Waco Kid. Wayne told Brooks that he thought the script was "funny as hell", but said it was "too dirty," and his fans would never accept him in the role. He also said he would do anything he could to help him get the picture made, and be the first in line to see it when it came out.

Re-mortgaged his house in Hollywood in order to finance Alamo (1960). While the movie was a success internationally, it lost him a great deal of money personally. For the next four years he had to make one film after another, including Der längste Tag (1962), for which he was paid $250,000 for four days work. By early 1962 his financial problems were resolved.

In the late 1970s Wayne made a series of commercials for the Great Western Savings Bank in Los Angeles. The day after the first one aired, a man walked into a GW branch in West Hollywood with a suitcase, asked to see the bank manager, and when he was shown to the manager's desk, he opened up the suitcase to reveal $500,000 in cash. He said, "If your bank is good enough for John Wayne, it's good enough for me." He had just closed his business and personal accounts at a rival bank down the street and walked to the GW branch to open accounts there because Wayne had endorsed it.

He and his drinking buddy, Ward Bond, frequently played practical jokes on each other. In one incident, Bond bet Wayne that they could stand on opposite sides of a newspaper and Wayne wouldn't be able to hit him. Bond set a sheet of newspaper down in a doorway, Wayne stood on one end, and Bond slammed the door in his face, shouting,"Try and hit me now!" Wayne responded by punching his fist through the door, flooring Bond and winning the bet.

When he was honored with a square at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood the sand used in the cement was brought in from Iwo Jima, in honor of his film Du warst unser Kamerad (1949).

In 1973 Clint Eastwood wrote to Wayne, suggesting they star in a western together. Wayne wrote back an angry response criticizing the revisionist style and violence of Eastwood's latest western, Ein Fremder ohne Namen (1973). Consequently Eastwood did not reply and no film was made.

In 1971 Wayne and James Stewart were traveling to Ronald Reagan's second inauguration as Governor of California when they encountered some anti-war demonstrators with a Vietcong flag. Stewart's stepson Ronald had been killed in Vietnam in 1969. Wayne walked over to speak to the protesters and within minutes the flag had been lowered.

His spoken album "America: Why I Love Her" became a surprise best-seller and Grammy nominee when it was released in 1973. Reissued on CD in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, it became a best-seller all over again.

In the mid-'30s he was hired by Columbia Pictures to make several westerns for its "B" unit. Columbia chief Harry Cohn, a married man, soon got the idea that Wayne had made a pass at a Columbia starlet with whom Cohn was having an affair. When he confronted Wayne about it Wayne denied it, but Cohn called up executives at other studios and told them that Wayne would show up for work drunk, was a womanizer and a troublemaker and requested that they not hire him. Wayne didn't work for several months afterward, and when he discovered what Cohn had done, he burst into Cohn's office at Columbia, grabbed him by the neck and threatened to kill him. After he cooled off he told Cohn that "as long as I live, I will never work one day for you or Columbia no matter how much you offer me." Later, after Wayne had become a major star, he received several lucrative film offers from Columbia, including the lead in Der Scharfschütze (1950), all of which he turned down cold. Even after Cohn died in 1958, Wayne still refused to entertain any offers whatsoever from Columbia Pictures, including several that would have paid him more than $1 million.

In November 2003 he once again commanded a top-ten spot in the annual Harris Poll asking Americans to name their favorite movie star. No other deceased star has achieved such ranking since Harris began asking the question in 1993. In a 2001 Gallup Poll, Americans selected Wayne as their favorite movie star of all time. He has been in the top-ten of the Harris poll each and every year it has come out, and usually in the top three. He is the only deceased actor to ever appear in this poll.

After Ronald Reagan's election as Governor of California in 1966, Wayne was exiting a victory celebration when he was asked by police not to leave the building--a mob of 300 angry anti-war demonstrators was waiting outside. Instead of cowering indoors, he confronted the demonstrators head-on. When protesters waved the Viet Cong flag under his nose, Wayne grew impatient. "Please don't do that fellows," Duke warned the assembled. "I've seen too many kids your age wounded or dead because of that flag. So I don't take too kindly to it." The demonstrators persisted, so he chased a group of them down an alley.

SPOILER: Of the near 200 films Wayne made, he died in only eight: Piraten im Karibischen Meer (1942) (octopus attack), Alarm im Pazifik (1944) (gunshot/explosion), Im Banne der roten Hexe (1948) (drowning), Du warst unser Kamerad (1949) (gunshot wounds), Alamo (1960) (lance/explosion), Der Mann der Liberty Valance erschoss (1962) (natural causes), Die Cowboys (1972) (gunshot wounds) and The Shootist - Der letzte Scharfschütze (1976) (shotgun wounds). His fate in Der See-Fuchs (1955) is undetermined--he may have died when his ship sank, or he (and Lana Turner) may have made it to shore.

Gave Sammy Davis Jr. the first cowboy hat he ever wore in a film.

During the filming of Die Unbesiegten (1969), he fell from his horse and fractured three ribs. He couldn't work for almost two weeks. Then he tore a ligament in his shoulder and couldn't use one arm at all. The director, Andrew V. McLaglen, could only film him from an angle for the rest of the picture. His only concern throughout was not to disappoint his fans, despite being in terrible pain.

The Shootist - Der letzte Scharfschütze (1976) is widely considered the best final film by any major star, rivaled only by Clark Gable's role in Misfits - Nicht gesellschaftsfähig (1961) and Henry Fonda's role in Am goldenen See (1981).

Once made a cameo appearance on The Beverly Hillbillies (1962) in the episode The Indians Are Coming (1967). When asked how he wanted to be paid, his answer was, "Give me a fifth of bourbon--that'll square it.".

During a visit to London in January 1974 to appear on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (1969) and Parkinson (1971), Wayne caught pneumonia. For a 66-year-old man with one lung this was very serious, and eventually he was coughing so hard that he damaged a valve in his heart. This problem went undetected until March 1978, when he underwent emergency open heart surgery in Boston. Bob Hope delivered a message from the The 50th Annual Academy Awards (1978), saying, "We want you to know Duke, we miss you tonight. We expect you to amble out here in person next year, because there is nobody who can fill John Wayne's boots." According to Loretta Young, that message from Hope made Wayne determined to live long enough to attend the Oscars in 1979.

Allegedly thrust his Best Actor Oscar for Der Marshal (1969) to Richard Burton at the The 42nd Annual Academy Awards (1970), telling the Welsh actor, "You should have this, not me."

Although it has often been written that he was dying of cancer when he made The Shootist - Der letzte Scharfschütze (1976), his final film, this is not actually true. Following the removal of his entire left lung in 1964, he was cancer-free for the next 12 years. It wasn't until Christmas 1978 that he fell seriously ill again, and in January of the following year the cancer was found to have returned.

Despite his numerous alleged anti-gay remarks in interviews over the years,Wayne co-starred with Rock Hudson in Die Unbesiegten (1969), even though he knew of the actor's homosexuality. In this Civil War epic, the champion of political conservatism worked well with and even became good friends with Hudson, Hollywood's gayest (although it wasn't publicly known at the time) leading man.They remained good friends until Wayne's death in 1979.

Was a Master Mason.

While filming Der Marshal (1969), he was trying to keep weight off with drugs--uppers for the day, downers to sleep at night. Occasionally he got the pills mixed up, and this led to problems on a The Dean Martin Show (1965) taping in 1969. Instead of taking an upper before leaving for the filming, he took a downer--and was ready to crash by the time he arrived on the set. "I can't do our skit," Wayne reportedly told Martin when it was time to perform. "I'm too doped up. Goddamn, I look half smashed!" Naturally, Martin didn't have a problem with that. "Hell, Duke, people think I do the show that way all the time!" The taping went on as scheduled.

His production company, Batjac, was originally to be called Batjak, after the shipping company owned by Luther Adler's character in the film Im Banne der roten Hexe (1948). A secretary's typo while she was drawing up the papers resulted in it being called Batjac, and Wayne, not wanting to hurt her feelings, kept her spelling of it.

His image was so far-reaching that when Emperor Hirohito visited America in 1975, he asked to meet the veteran star. Wayne was quoted in the "Chicago Sun-Times" as saying, "I must have killed off the entire Japanese army.".

Michael Caine recalled in his 1992 autobiography "What's It All About?" that Wayne gave him two pieces of advice when they first met in Hollywood early in 1967. Firstly, on acting, Wayne told him, "Talk low, talk slow, and don't talk too much." Then he added, "And never wear suede shoes. One time I was taking a piss when a guy next to me turned round and said, 'John Wayne!', and pissed all over my shoes".

Was voted the 5th Greatest Movie Star of all time by "Entertainment Weekly".

His Oscar win for Der Marshal (1969) was widely seen as more of a lifetime achievement award, since his performance had been criticized as over-the-top and hammy. In his "Reader's Digest" article on Wayne from October 1979, Ronald Reagan wrote that the award was both in recognition of his whole career and to make up for his not receiving nominations for Panik am roten Fluß (1948), Der Teufelshauptmann (1949) and Der schwarze Falke (1956).

It was no surprise that Wayne would become such an enduring icon. By the early 1970s his contemporaries Humphrey Bogart, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni and Gary Cooper were dead. James Cagney and Cary Grant both retired from acting at 62. The careers of other stars declined considerably--both Henry Fonda and James Stewart ended up working on television series that wound up being canceled. Wayne, however, continued to star in movies until 1976, remaining one of the top ten US box-office stars until 1974.

Underwent surgery to have a cancerous left lung removed on 9/17/64 in a six-hour operation. Press releases at the time reported that he was in Los Angeles' Good Samaritan Hospital to be treated for lung congestion. When Hollywood columnist James Bacon went to the hospital to see Wayne, he was told by a nurse that Wayne wasn't having visitors. According to a 6/27/78 "Us" magazine article, Wayne said to his nurse from his room, "Let that son of a bitch come in." When Bacon sat down in his room, Wayne told him, "Well, I licked the Big C." Wayne confessed that his five-packs-a-day cigarette habit had caused a lung tumor the size of a golf ball, necessitating the removal of the entire lung. One day following surgery, Wayne began coughing so violently he ruptured his stitches and damaged delicate tissue. His face and hands began to swell up from a mixture of fluid and air, but the doctors didn't dare operate again so soon. Five days later they drained the fluid and repaired the stitches. On 12/29/64 he held a press conference at his Encino ranch, against the advice of his agent and advisers, where he announced, "I licked the Big C. I know the man upstairs will pull the plug when he wants to, but I don't want to end my life being sick. I want to go out on two feet, in action." Before he had left the hospital on October 19, he received the news that his 52-year-old brother Robert E. Morrison had lung cancer.

In the final years of his life, with the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War, Wayne's political beliefs appeared to have moderated. He attended the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter on 1/20/77, and along with his fellow conservative James Stewart he could be seen applauding Jane Fonda at Salut für Henry Fonda (1978). Later in 1978 he uncharacteristically sided with the Democrats and President Carter against his fellow conservative Republicans over the issue of the Panama Canal, which Wayne believed belonged to the people of Panama and not the US.

Despite being best known as a conservative Republican, his politics throughout his life were fluid. He later claimed to have considered himself a socialist during his first year of college. As a young actor in Hollywood, he described himself as a liberal, and voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election. In 1938 he attended a fundraiser for a Democratic candidate in New York, but soon afterwards "realized Democrats didn't stand for the same things I did". Henry Fonda believed Wayne called himself a liberal just so he wouldn't fall out with director John Ford, an activist liberal Democrat. It really wasn't until the 1940s that Wayne moved fully to the right on the political spectrum. Even then, however, he was not always in lockstep with the rest of the conservative movement--a fact that was nonetheless unknown to the public until 1978, when he openly differed with the Republican Party over the issue of the Panama Canal. Conservatives wanted America to retain full control, but Wayne, believing that the Panamanians had the right to the canal, sided with President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats to win passage of the treaty returning the canal in the Senate. Carter openly credited Wayne with being a decisive factor in convincing some Republican Senators to support the measure.

He has appeared in nine films that have been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Der große Treck (1930), Baby Face (1933), Höllenfahrt nach Santa Fé (1939), Panik am roten Fluß (1948), Der Sieger (1952), Der schwarze Falke (1956), Rio Bravo (1959), Der Mann der Liberty Valance erschoss (1962) and Das war der wilde Westen (1962).

The inscription on the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to him in 1979 reads, simply, "John Wayne, American."

Maureen O'Hara presented him with the People's Choice Award for most popular motion picture actor in 1976.

Wore a toupee in every film from Im Banne der roten Hexe (1948) for the rest of his illustrious career.

During the filming of Dem Adler gleich (1957) he didn't wear it at all for the latter part of the film, showing the character in later life. Wayne's hairpiece can be seen to fall off during a fight scene in Land der 1000 Abenteuer (1960).