Across four and a half decades as the archetypal western film hero, John Wayne wasn’t supposed to die very often. That’s why it might come as a surprise that his characters were killed off more frequently than we might imagine.
In fact, some of his most iconic roles, from Sgt John M Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, for which he received an Oscar nomination, to Davy Crockett in The Alamo, involve his killing at the hands of enemy forces. Then there are the three early roles that feature scenes in which his characters die by drowning. In 1933’s Central Airport, he’s an unnamed pilot who dies during an underwater rescue attempt following a plane crash, while Reap the Wild Wind and Wake of the Red Witch both involve terrifying depictions of diving suit deaths. The former, as Wayne’s character is being strangled by a giant squid, and the latter with a close-up on his helmet filling up with water.
Perhaps the deaths that most Wayne fans remember best come in two of his final film roles. The iconic shooting of his character Wil Andersen as he fearlessly turns his back on armed cattle rustler Asa Watts in the 1972 movie The Cowboys is one of his finest moments on camera. Meanwhile, his final on-screen role in The Shootist also featured the demise of his character JB Books, although a stunt double had to be used for the money shot as Wayne was already seriously ill with lung cancer during production.
And so, while none of Big Jake, Ethan Edwards or Rooster Cogburn meet their end on screen, at least some of John Wayne’s more prominent cinematic characters do die before our eyes. And it’s just as well we’re only talking about Wayne’s characters, as the man himself narrowly escaped death during a fair few film shoots.
But what’s the total death count?
In addition to being drowned, shot in the back, shot during a cigarette break on the front line, speared while defending the Alamo, and standing aside for a stunt double to take the cinematic bullet, Wayne encountered death from his own side in 1944’s The Fighting Seabees. His character, Lt Cmdr ‘Wedge’ Donovan, is shot by friendly fire during a machine gun on the Japanese by American soldiers in the Second World War.
In a rare portrayal of someone with ambivalent moral standing, his character Ted Hayden is poisoned at a watering hole while posing as the murderous Gat Ganns in the early western movie West of the Divide. Wayne’s characters clearly didn’t get on with water back in the 1930s and 1940s.
Which comes to a total of nine on-screen deaths for John Wayne characters. His character, Tom Doniphon, is killed off-screen in the John Ford classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. If we include this death in the final count, that makes ten fatalities for John Wayne characters among the movies in which he starred. That’s still a rate of just one death for every 14 feature films he made overall, though. The Duke’s still very much alive in the rest.