According to one biographer, “John Wayne personified for millions the nation’s frontier heritage.” It was John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) that made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether.
He played leading roles in numerous B movies during the 1930s, most of them also Westerns, without becoming a major name. He appeared mostly in small parts, but his first leading role came in Raoul Walsh’s Western The Big Trail (1930), an early widescreen film epic which was a box-office failure. He lost a football scholarship to the University of Southern California as a result of a bodysurfing accident, and began working for the Fox Film Corporation.
Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, but grew up in Southern California.
