National Football Foundation

Saluted as one of the most patriotic men the nation has ever produced, John Duke Wayne enjoyed a successful film career in which he was the top money winner in the business for 23 consecutive years. He topped the box offices four times, and appeared in a total of 170 films. Wayne scored a hat trick for his role as the Western Marshal in “True Grit,” taking home the Academy and Golden Globe awards for Best Actor.

The Glendale, Calif., native appeared on two unbeaten Glendale High School teams, leading to an athletic scholarship to USC. Wayne played on the freshman team, and was a member of College Football Hall of Fame head coach Howard Jones’ varsity team. He found work at local film studios when he lost his scholarship as a result of a bodysurfing accident. Initially working for the Fox Film Corporation, he mostly appeared in small bit parts. His first leading role came in the widescreen epic “The Big Trail” (1930), which led to leading roles in numerous films throughout the 1930s, many of them in the western genre.

Wayne has been honored by the U.S. Marine Corps with the Iron Mike Award, the highest honor given to a civilian, the Veterans of Foreign Wars with the Americanism Award, and the American Legion with another Americanism Award.  He also won The Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Wayne defeated lung cancer in 1964, but passed away due to stomach cancer in 1979 at the age of 72.