May 26 marks the 100th anniversary of John Wayne’s birth. I’ve already written about two other centenaries this month, Katherine Hepburn and Laurence Oliver, and I could do a similar piece on Wayne. I could but I’m not going to, because for me Wayne is a more personal subject and somehow a brief summing up of his career just doesn’t seem right.

So what makes Duke special? Well my Father was a big Wayne fan and thanks to these two men I fell in love with film and in particular the western. It’s a love that remains strong to this day.

The west of the movies was an uncharted land, filled with danger but also excitement. It was a place where a man lived by his own rules, surely something every kid dreams of, where to quote Wayne, “There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.” In essence many of the westerns I watched growing up were morality plays, and I think they (along with Marvel comics) helped shape my views on right and wrong.

John Wayne films weren’t my only exposure to the western growing up. The late '60s early '70s were the height of the western TV craze and I watched many of them, including such forgotten series as Lancer and Hondo. Nor was he my only exposure to films; I’d watch almost anything, from Shirley Temple to Tarzan. But if Wayne was on TV, we watched it and I’d scour the TV listing magazine each week to see what treats were in store. This was back in the days when there were only three television channels in the UK and movies were a big part of their schedule, getting prime time screenings.

Of course Wayne didn’t just star in westerns. I watched him kill half of the Japanese army, wrestle a giant octopus not once, but twice (okay, one was a squid), get lost in the desert with Sophia Loren, put out oil fires, and catch animals in Africa.

Not every role was a perfect fit. One can only wonder what they were thinking with The Sea Chase; John Wayne surely couldn’t have been the first name they thought of for German freighter captain Karl Ehrlich. But his two most outlandish roles must be Genghis Khan in The Conqueror and a Roman Centurion in The Greatest Story Ever Told.

My Dad’s preference (with one exception, The Quiet Man) was always for the westerns though. John Ford’s cavalry trilogy, Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and El Dorado and his Oscar winning turn in True Grit were some of our favourites, as were the comedy westerns McLintock and North to Alaska (my Mum loved Stewart Granger). My personal favourite was The Searchers.

Wayne to me became a veritable superhero; sure, he could get shot but he didn’t die. My first recollection of seeing Duke die onscreen was in The Alamo and I remember finding it deeply upsetting. I may well have seen him meet his end at the hands, or rather tentacles, of a giant octopus in Reap the Wild Wind before that, but this was different, here he was killed by a mere man — run through by a Mexican soldier! It wasn’t his only memorable death scene. The Cowboys and The Shootist both saw him meet an equally heroic end.