Thanks to his successful career, John Wayne rose to become one of the most famous movie stars in history. The “True Grit” actor started off in a completely different field of employment before becoming the biggest cinematic star of his generation.

John Wayne was not only a well-known movie star but also a renowned family man.

He had seven kids from three different marriages. It turns out that John Wayne was one of the outliers, as several actors’ children may remember not having their mother or father around when they were young.

Several of his children have made public comments about him since his terrible death, exposing the truth for everyone to read. Here is everything you need to know about the illustrious John Wayne, including his untimely death.

Actually, John Wayne was not born John Wayne. The well-known performer was really born Marion Morrison on May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa. His first “name change” happened when he was a small child, all because of the Airedale [Terrier] dog named Duke that his parents, Clyde and Mary, owned.

John Wayne – early life, name

“There’s a picture of him in the book, he looked to weigh about 80 pounds — and Marion was Little Duke. He liked the name and for the rest of his life he always insisted that people call him Duke,” biographer Scott Eyman’s mentioned.

When Wayne was around nine or ten, his family decided to move to Glendale, California. His father began working there as a pharmacist, but the family faced many challenges along the way. Simply put, it turned out that making it in California wasn’t all that simple. In the end, John Wayne was given the opportunity to see many things that would shape his character and values.

For this reason alone, his time there probably helped him significantly later in life.

“You have this young boy, who has a sickly father, and they move west to the Mojave Desert to try to farm. That’s a rough place to farm, and they fail, and he has a very hard, charging mother,” Wayne’s father Ethan said when recounting his father’s upbringing.

“It’s tough on the father and he’s never satisfied. And they end up in Glendale – which, at that time, was in another small, rural environment, and the father was social, and the mother was kind of a taskmaster. And I think [John] found solace in school and relationships in school.”

John enrolled at Glendale High School, where he first found his passion for acting. Besides playing football and excelling in his classes, among other activities, he also participated in student theatrical productions.

He led the debate team, served on the dance committee, and was the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper.

First chance at fame Wayne was the squad’s captain and led the football team to a winning season, which allowed him to receive a football scholarship to the University of Southern California.

He was a terrific student at first, but the tuition was pricey, so he eventually quit to work. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason he decided against going to college.

No, it appeared like the young John Wayne would pursue a career in the National Football League. Despite having the talent and the will, he was hurt in a bodysurfing accident in 1926.

So Wayne got a job at the local movie studios, employed as both a prop man and an extra in several films. It was there he came into contact with some influential people in the movie business, including John Ford, who taught him a lot.

“I was a carpenter, I was a juicer. I rigged lights, I helped build sets. Carried props. Hauled furniture. I got to know the nuts and bolts of making pictures,” Wayne said, as quoted in Scott Eyman’s biography, John Wayne: The Life and Legend.

On the set of the 1928 motion picture Mother Machree, where he was tasked with herding geese, Wayne first collaborated with the aforementioned Ford. He had spent a number of years working at the studio and was well known to many individuals. One such person was the director Raoul Walsh, who offered John his first job when he was still known as Marion Morrison.

Soon after, he was cast as the star of the 1930 picture The Big Trail, and it was on that set that his name underwent a permanent alteration.

“Back then the studios didn’t like ethnic names, they wanted names that sounded kind of classical,” Eyman explained.

How John Wayne changed his name

“Winfield Sheehan, who ran Fox Studios, was a big fan of ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne, the Revolutionary War general — that’s where the ‘Wayne’ came from, and ‘John’ just sort of came up in conversations because it seemed to fit with ‘Wayne’: ‘John Wayne.’ It had a nice symmetry to it.”

From that point, Marion – also referred to by his family as Duke – became known as John Wayne. It also marked the start of what would be one of the most legendary careers in all of film history.

What followed for Wayne was a bunch of classic movies. First, he starred in the 1939 classic Stagecoach, following it up with several more hits in the 1950s such as The Quiet Man, Rio Bravo, and later on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In 1969, he appeared in True Grit.

Yet despite John Wayne quickly becoming the talk of the town, John himself didn’t see himself as a big star. Instead, he always felt that “Duke Morrison” and “John Wayne” were two completely different people – two entities living in one body.

“The guy you see on the screen isn’t really me,” Wayne said in 1957.

“I’m Duke Morrison, and I never was and never will be a film personality like John Wayne. I know him well. I’m one of his closest students. I have to be. I make a living out of him.”

Many actors nowadays prepare for roles by literally trying to become the character they will play. A large part of portraying another person is centered around authenticity, and any good actor will want to know their character inside and out.

For John Wayne, this was only partially the method. According to Eyman, he insisted that people always referred to him by his childhood nickname, Duke.

John Wayne – marriages, wife, children

“In Wayne’s own mind, he was Duke Morrison,” Eyman wrote in the autobiography. “John Wayne was to him what the Tramp was to Charlie Chaplin — a character that overlapped his own personality, but not to the point of subsuming it.”

“I’ve always been Duke, or Marion, or John Wayne,” the actor said in 1975. “It’s a name that goes well together, and it’s like one word: JohnWayne.”

Besides his successful film career, John became a husband and father. However, his personal life off-set was one of many twists and turns.

He married his first wife, Josephine Wayne, in 1933, with whom he had four children, Patrick, Mary, Michael, and Melinda. The couple split 12 years later, and just one year after that, Wayne married second-wife Esperanza Baur. Their marriage lasted for eight years.

In 1954, Wayne tied the knot for the third time. He and Peruvian actress Pilar Pallet married and had three children: Aissa, Ethan, and Marisa. They stayed married until his passing.

Of course, growing up with a father who was a major Hollywood star must have been a rather unique experience for his children. Wayne, however, never thought of himself as better than anyone else.

During a 2017 interview with Jeremy Roberts, Patrick, one of his youngest children, offered an insight into what his father was like.