John Wayne Highlands, fierce fighters against communism, bestowed on Wayne a brass bracelet that he wore in the film and all subsequent films. Wayne finally won a Best Actor Oscar for "True Grit" (1969), two decades after his only other nomination. Wayne took on the role of the eponymous detective in the crime drama "McQ" (1974). His last film was "The Shootist" (1976), whose main character, J. B. Books, was dying of cancer—which Wayne himself succumbed to three years later. "The Shootist" (1976) contains numerous plot similarities to "The Gunfighter" of nearly thirty years before, a role which Wayne had wanted but
Wayne S. Vucinich Wayne S. Vucinich Wayne S. Vucinich (June 23, 1913 – April 21, 2005) was an American professor and historian, as well as a founding father of the Russian, Slavic, East European and Byzantine scholarship at Stanford University following World War II. He was also director of the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies and spent his academic career at Stanford University. Vucinich was born in the United States to a family of Serb immigrants who had come from Bosnia in the early twentieth century. He was born in Butte, Montana in 1913, and lived there until he was orphaned