Killing John Wayne

[snopes]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/...VD-watch_N.htm

It is generally thought that Wayne never died in a movie. But by my count, he did so at least eight times: Reap the Wild Wind (1942; death by Oscar-winning giant squid); The Fighting Seabees (1944; takes a bullet while driving a bulldozer into an oil tank); Wake of the Red Witch (1949; deep in the drink); Sands of Iwo Jima (1949; sniper); The Alamo (1960; pretty hard to foil the Grim Reaper in this one); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962; in a coffin; the story is told in flashback); The Cowboys (1972; cattle rustlers); and The Shootist(1976; shootout, though the character also has cancer).

[snopes]

I though the legend was not that John Wayne never died in a film, but that any character who killed him in a film was himself killed before the end of the movie.

- snopes

[Brad from Georgia]

I recently heard Bruce Dern, whose character killed Wayne's character in The Cowboys, interviewed on NPR. Dern says that when Wayne was being wired for bullet squibs, he remarked that he'd never had them applied before, and he said to Dern, "You get killed all the time. Are these damn things painful?"

Dern said "I grinned at him and said, 'Duke...this is gonna hurt like hell.'"