John Wayne's Daughter Says The Actor Hid His Cancer To Prolong His Career

Jan 30, 2020 by apost team

"The Big C" is the name of a "prestige television" series produced for the Showtime cable network from 2010 to 2013, and it is centered on the final years in the life of an American woman diagnosed with cancer. The name of the series is a euphemism for the terrible disease, but not many people know that legendary actor John Wayne came up with it completely on his own.

Four decades have passed since Marion Mitchell Morrison, who would later be known as John "The Duke" Wayne, died of cancer, a condition he battled since the mid-1960s. What started out as lung cancer eventually metastasized into aggressively malignant tumors that spread to his stomach, states Villages News.

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When he played the part of an old cowboy who is being decimated by cancer in the 1976 film "The Shootist," the pain you see on-screen is very real; John Wayne would die three years later despite once being told by doctors that he had been cured.

Aissa Wayne, one of John Wayne's numerous children he had with three wives, has been recently posting Instagram updates related to her memoir about the Duke entitled "John Wayne: My Father."

Something that she fondly remembers is that he never mentioned the word cancer in front of her or the rest of the children. It was always "the Big C," and that was the name he coined for the devastating cellular mutation that kills millions of people each year, reports Villages News.

He tried to live his life as the tough guy characters he played: outlaws from the Old West, soldiers, cattle ranchers, and traumatized Civil War veterans consumed by their own intolerance. He could never come across as an ailing cancer patient because he felt that audiences would never want to see him succumb to illness.

According to Villages News, Duke got his nickname as a child because he was inseparable from his dog named Duke. Born in Iowa but raised in Southern California, his interest in manly pursuits such as surfing, herding cattle, drag racing, and American football would eventually result in an injury that prevented him from entering the Naval Academy or taking advantage of an athletic scholarship. Being passed over for military service was something that Aissa Wayne explains in her book, was very difficult for her father because he felt that he had let his country down.

So there you have it: "The Big C" is an expression invented by John Wayne, and he dealt with this condition in all the films he appeared in from the 1960s until he died. Let your friends know about this interesting tidbit of Hollywood history.