There are a thousand different ways to draw an acclaimed performance out of an actor, with John Wayne deciding that tough love was the best course of action for a co-star who didn’t exactly win him over.
As one of the biggest stars and most forceful personalities in Hollywood, ‘The Duke’ was usually the loudest voice on any set he worked on unless he was being directed by John Ford, who was about the only person in the industry Wayne would defer to with any sort of regularity.
Once he began producing through his Batjac company, Wayne became more invested than ever in the films he developed from the ground up. One of his earliest efforts was 1953’s Hondo, with Batjac purchasing the rights to Louis L’Amour’s short story The Gift of Cochise.
The icon drafted in his friend and regular collaborator James Edward Grant to pen the screenplay, and when the shoot didn’t turn out quite how the leading man had envisioned, he even brought in the man he called ‘Pappy’ to shoot the final scenes as an uncredited guest director.
However, no movie is a sure thing, and the hiring of Geraldine Page was viewed by many with a raised eyebrow. For one thing, she was the complete opposite of ‘The Duke’ as a method actor with an extensive background in Broadway, but he decided she was perfect for sparring opposite his signature persona in a rough-and-tumble western designed to appeal to mainstream audiences.
Funnily enough, Page’s approach to the profession rubbed him the wrong way, which anybody could have seen coming, given Wayne’s more conventional tactics. “She may have been great on Broadway, but she doesn’t know a damn thing about making movies,” he ranted. “I don’t know where some of these artsy New York theatre people get their manners.”
According to ‘The Duke’, Page remained so deeply in character as a 19th-century homesteader scraping to get by that “she sat down at dinner one night and ate her mashed potatoes with her fingers.” In the name of authenticity, she also “didn’t care much for makeup, or soap and water for that matter,” with Wayne growing so frustrated that during one cast and crew meal, he upturned his plate on top of her head.
When the time came for their characters to shoot a love scene together, Ford decided to get in on the act, too. The director suggested that viewers maybe wouldn’t be convinced that “a handsome man like Duke could be in love with such a homely woman,” and Wayne didn’t even want to shoot the sequence twice.
“Damn him,” he said, per Pilar Wayne and Alex Thorleifson’s John Wayne: My Life with the Duke. “Shooting that scene the first time was bad enough.” Despite spending almost the entire time on Hondo being belittled by her colleague and his closest ally, Page had the last laugh when her method acting got her on the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.