Acting isn’t supposed to be a particularly dangerous profession, especially for those who spend most of their career playing themselves. And yet, John Wayne somehow managed to dice with death on several occasions, and it’s even been suggested that one of his movies was the one that got the job done.
It goes without saying that health and safety precautions weren’t as stringent during the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood as they are now, but ‘The Duke’ still tended to play it safe. Most of his most famous features and greatest performances saw him playing thinly veiled extensions of the persona he’d crafted to such enduring and popular effect, not that Wayne was above running headlong into danger.
Sometimes, though, it was the director’s fault. The Sons of Katie Elder filmmaker and regular collaborator, Henry Hathaway, admitted that he faced some serious blowback from the actor’s family when he refused to let a stuntman step in for a scene that required Wayne to be dragged into a freezing cold river, just months after he’d undergone cancer surgery.
He almost died when a burning set nearly collapsed on top of him when shooting Circus World, a catering truck crashed into his trailer when ‘The Duke’ was enjoying his downtime on Hellfighters, and The Conqueror has been singled out as perhaps the deadliest production in cinema history, with Wayne just one of many cast and crew members who succumbed to an abnormally high cancer rate.
The face of the classic western was used to dealing with near-death experiences, but being impaled by a charging rhinoceros would have been a hell of a way to go. Howard Hawks’ 1962 adventure Hatari! was shot largely on location, and it would be an understatement to say that Wayne wasn’t entirely thrilled about wrangling so many animal co-stars.
In fact, certain sections of dialogue had to be re-recorded in post-production because the leading man couldn’t stop himself from turning the air blue and swearing repeatedly when he was dealing with several unruly members of the animal kingdom, particularly the rhino that bookended the film.
While it’s been shown that animals can be trained to work in film and television, a gigantic hulking beast with a deadly horn on its head is completely different from a dog, an orangutan, or even a bear. Wayne was understandably panicked when it was time for the rhino to get its moment in the spotlight, and his fears were hardly assuaged when it broke free from its shackles and threatened to run amok.
All he could muster was a desperate, and wholly accurate, cry of, “The son of a bitch is loose!” as the rhino decided it didn’t want to be a movie star after all, forcing ‘The Duke’ to flee from the scene as fast as he possibly could to avoid being impaled and ensure he was as far away as he could get when the animal wranglers attempted to diffuse the situation.