Soon after his 57th birthday, John Wayne learned that he had a big cancerous tumour on his left lung. "I sat there," he later wisecracked, "trying to be John Wayne." Who was that imaginary figure: Western hero? Shy giant? Rightist bigot? American myth? Scott Eyman knows the questions but leaves it mostly to others to say what Wayne's outsize screen personage meant. He concentrates instead on what Wayne, the actor, did. In comprehensive detail, this new biography chronicles a great star at work. Light on Hollywood gush and sleaze, it tracks the ups and downs of a long career. Its patient record of Wayne's triple hold on audiences, critics and moneymen goes some way to explaining an astonishing fact about a man who was born in 1907, not long after the birth of film itself: that even today, Wayne remains one of the top-ten favourite stars in America, a fixed point in an otherwise changeable field of actors and actresses young enough to be his greatgrandchildren.
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