Even though they were two of the biggest stars Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ had to offer, John Wayne and Kirk Douglas took very different approaches to their careers once they’d established a foothold in the cutthroat industry.
Whereas ‘The Duke’ maintained his position by adhering rigidly to type and refusing to play any characters he didn’t think were reflective of what audiences wanted to see from him, Douglas seized control of his own destiny to avoid being cast in movies he didn’t want to be involved with.
Douglas was among the first nameworthy stars to found their own production company, and while he was happy to take the odd paycheque gig on occasion because those bills still needed to be paid at the end of the day, it was a ‘one for them, one for me’ deal that allowed him to take some big swings.
Wayne, meanwhile, always relied on his tried-and-trusted persona to put butts in seats, and their opposing views on how to navigate the business worked out equally well for them. However, there was one part Douglas played that left the face of the western completely aghast.
1956’s biographical drama Lust for Life cast Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh, with the end result being a well-received picture that earned four Academy Award nominations including a ‘Best Actor’ nod for the leading man, with co-star Anthony Quinn taking home the prize for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
The role required Douglas to dial down his innate charisma in order to better embody Van Gogh’s more muted and introspective tendencies, and ‘The Duke’ couldn’t figure out for the life of him why his contemporary would go out of his way to play a character who wasn’t a cut-and-dried hero. As he explained, per The Guardian, Wayne viewed it as an act of betrayal.
“‘Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There’s so few of us left, we’ve got to play strong, tough characters, not those weak queers,’” Douglas quoted him as saying. “I tried to explain; ‘It’s all make-believe, John. It isn’t real. You’re not really John Wayne, you know’. He just looked at me oddly. I had betrayed him.”
He must have gotten over it eventually, though, seeing as Wayne and Douglas shared star billing a decade later in quick succession. By the time they’d reunited and led the romantic war epic In Harm’s Way and western heist thriller The War Wagon in 1965 and 1967, respectively, the former’s bemusement over the latter’s decision to play Van Gogh must have been water under the bridge.
It was a perfect illustration of their viewpoints in a way, with Wayne left incredulous by a fellow A-lister unshackling themselves from prospective typecasting in favour of creative risks, something ‘The Duke’ was hardly known for doing.