John Wayne was the Duke, and the Duke was America on horseback: tall, steady and certain, a man who walked into a room as if he already knew how the story would end.
Marion Robert Morrison was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa, and grew up in California, where he earned the nickname Duke after a family dog. A football scholarship took him to the University of Southern California, and work as a prop man and extra in films led to his first starring western, The Big Trail (1930). The film did not make him a star, but years of B-westerns and serials taught him the craft of the screen.
His breakthrough came in Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford, in which he played the Ringo Kid, an escaped outlaw who joins a stagecoach journey across Apache country. Ford and Wayne would make many films together, including Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956), in which Wayne played the obsessive Ethan Edwards, a role now regarded as his greatest.
Wayne became the most durable star of the western, in Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and he also made war films such as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination. In True Grit (1969) he played the one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn, a role that finally won him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
His final film was The Shootist (1976), in which he played an ageing gunfighter facing death, a part that mirrored his own illness. Wayne died on June 11, 1979, but the Duke never really left the screen. He remains the image of the American West: plain-spoken, loyal and unshakeable.