John Wayne

American actor, born Marion Morrison in 1907. One of the biggest stars in the history of cinema, he made his first leading appearance in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930), but the film's failure kept him in low-budget westerns for most of the decade. John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made him a major star, and he went on to define the on-screen cowboy in films like Red River (1948), The Searchers (1956), Rio Bravo (1959), and True Grit (1969), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He died in 1979.