Hair piece worn by John Wayne in True Grit: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

Hair piece worn by John Wayne in the 1969 Western film True Grit. The brown hair toupee is pinned to a cloth dummy head. When Wayne's hair began to thin toward the middle of his career, he began wearing hairpieces in his film performances, even joking about them in public appearances.

John Wayne played Rooster Cogburn in the American Western film True Grit, directed by Henry Hathaway and produced by Hal B. Wallis. For his performance, Wayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama. Although the Western film genre was beginning losing popularity by the late 1960s, the film True Grit and the character Rooster Cogburn were both critically acclaimed and commercially successful, and a sequel titled Rooster Cogburn was released in 1975. True Grit was celebrated for its non-traditional female lead character: actress Kim Darby played Mattie Ross, a strong-willed and independent teenager seeking to avenge her father’s murder. Fighting for acceptance and power in a world controlled by white men, Ross contributed to the cultural significance of the film, showing women as men’s equals even in the violent, merciless world of the 19th century West.

John Wayne (born Marion Robert Morrison) was a ground breaking American film actor, director and producer who epitomized rugged masculinity and became an popular culture icon. He was known for his distinctive voice, walk, and screen presence, as well as his outspoken conservative political views. Nicknamed “The Duke”, Wayne worked tirelessly on low-budget western films in the 1930s which allowed him to develop his distinctive persona. He then got his breakthrough role as The Ringo Kid in director John Ford's classic Stagecoach (1939), earning opportunities to star in iconic roles during Hollywood’s Golden Age. In classic films like Red River, The Searchers, True Grit, and The Shootist, Wayne helped shape the Western film genre and, to his fans, offered a model of American heroism and manly values. Later in life Wayne battled cancer; before it took his life in 1979 he founded the John Wayne Cancer Foundation, with a mission to "bring courage, strength, and grit to the fight against cancer."

Materials, dates and provenance

• date made: before 1969
• user: Wayne, John
• Object Name: (2) Hair Pieces in Case
• Object Name: hair piece
• Physical Description: metal (overall material)
• Physical Description: hair (overall material)
• Physical Description: cloth (overall material)
• Measurements: average spatial: 14 in x 13 in; x 35.56 cm x 33.02 cm
• Subject: Hair
• Subject: Motion Pictures
• ID Number: 1991.0441.02
• catalog number: 1991.0441.02
• accession number: 1991.0441
• catalog number: 1991.0441.02
• Credit Line: Dave Grayson
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.