Wayne, John (1907-1979)
To millions of people around the world, John Wayne has come to be more than just the single most recognizable screen actor in the history of film: John Wayne is America. From the late 1920s to the mid-1970s John Wayne played a cavalcade of heroes on screen. The characters Wayne usually played after his rise to stardom were not always likable. They were practically never what at the millennium has come to be known as "politically correct"; they rarely had any sensitivity for the plight of those who opposed them, and they were often characterized by an overt jingoism. Nevertheless, they uniformly had one thing in common: they were stereotypically American. As a result of this unifying trait, Wayne himself became, in the world's eye, synonymous with the mythical American values of rugged individualism, bravery, loyalty, integrity, and courage. However, even though he played a wide variety of characters, including soldiers, detectives, sailors, and football players, it is for his Western heroes that he is best remembered. As Garry Wills writes in John Wayne's America, "the strength of Wayne was that he embodied our deepest myth—that of the frontier."
John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, on May 26, 1907.
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