Wayne, John

1907–1979

American Actor, Director, and Producer

As a movie actor, director, producer, and right-wing political activist, John Wayne (nicknamed “The Duke”) became an iconic symbol of an idealized model of American masculinity that reflected American cultural and political concerns during the mid–twentieth century.

Wayne began his career in 1928 as a prop man on movie sets, after an injury prevented him from completing his football scholarship at the University of Southern California. He began acting in films in 1930 and appeared in approximately seventy films before achieving stardom as Ringo Kid in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). The film became a model for subsequent film Westerns, and Wayne became a model for portrayals of masculinity in the Western film genre: the lone, tough, confident, emotionally reserved, yet humane cowboy-warrior, ...