Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Wayne was an American actor born Marion Robert Morrison on the 26th of May 1907 in Winterset, Iowa. Nicknamed Duke, he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions and was among the top box-office draws for three decades.
A local fireman at the station on his route to school in Glendale started calling him Little Duke because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier named Duke. He preferred Duke to Marion, and the nickname stuck.
John Ford's Stagecoach in 1939 made Wayne a mainstream star. Before it, his first starring role in The Big Trail in 1930 had been a box-office failure, and he spent the 1930s in low-budget Poverty Row Westerns.
John Wayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing the one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit at the 42nd Academy Awards in 1969. He had earlier been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima in 1949 and as producer of The Alamo in 1960.
Wayne was exempted from World War II service due to his age, thirty-four at the time of Pearl Harbor, and his family status as 3-A. Republic Studios intervened in the Selective Service process to keep its only A-list actor under contract, and his failure to serve later became the most painful part of his life.
John Wayne died of stomach cancer on the 11th of June 1979 at age seventy-two at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He had survived lung cancer in 1964 after surgery removed his entire left lung and two ribs.
John Wayne was a vocally prominent conservative Republican who supported anti-communist positions and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He helped create the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944 and was elected its president in 1949, though he voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.