John Wayne

John Wayne was the face America gave to its own frontier myth, the towering, drawling icon of the Western who somehow became the nation's idea of itself. Born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907, he was nicknamed "Duke" as a boy in Glendale, lost a football scholarship to a bodysurfing injury, and drifted into the Fox lot before John Ford's Stagecoach turned him into a star in 1939. Across 179 productions and three decades atop the box office, he was the twin-faced Gemini Sun made cinema: a versatile shape-taker, the sign of "between," the eternal messenger who could be a cattleman, a marshal, a Civil War veteran, a hundred men in one. That Gemini Sun sits in his twelfth house, the unknowable realm of image and myth, which is fitting for a man who was really a persona, the Duke a costume worn over Marion Morrison. His Gemini Ascendant doubles the quicksilver mask. Yet underneath ran a Scorpio Moon in the sixth house, an emotional volcano kept composed, all-or-nothing loyalty and grit bound up in daily duty. That intensity is what made his stillness read as strength on screen. He won his Oscar for True Grit, and was posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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