Clint Eastwood and John Wayne’s Feud, Explained

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Movie stars don’t come much bigger than Clint Eastwood and John Wayne. Both belong to an era when movie stars were more than just popular actors who could reliably sell tickets. The Duke in particular represented the human embodiment of an ideology. He was more than just an avatar of conservative ideals, he was in many ways the face of a monoculture that simply no longer exists; a symbol of a society organized around shared ideals that disintegrated as the century progressed. Eastwood rose to fame in the ’70s, where the culture was much more fractured than it was in Wayne’s era. But it was as close as possible to what its ancestor stood for in the first half of the 20th century, especially when it came to the western genre.

Both Eastwood and the Duke cut their teeth at Oaters, establishing their enduring star power through horseback battles and a stoic machismo that allowed them to become emblems of masculinity for entire generations. While an on-screen meeting between the two seemed like a foregone conclusion, these two Western titans have actually never come face to face in any film.

A lot of this had to do with the fact that Wayne simply wasn’t a fan of Eastwood’s deconstructionist and cynical westerns. This led to a rift between the two men, which lasted until the Duke’s death in 1979. Eastwood had some clashes in his time (his feud with Spike Lee got so bad that Steven Spielberg had to intervene). But his problems with Wayne represented something much deeper: a clash of generations. Here’s everything you need to know about Wayne and Eastwood’s feud and why we’ve never seen these legends face each other.

Before becoming a movie legend, John Wayne was just a young college student and football player who helped with props on movie sets. It was during these early years that he met the director John Ford whom he literally knocked over during their first meeting and who would eventually cast Wayne in his seminal 1939 western, “Stagecoach.” Although there was a subversive element to the film, which undermined many of the genre’s well-established tropes by revealing its archetypal characters as more complex, complex individuals, it still remained a pre-revisionist era – one for which Wayne himself became emblematic.

Over the next three decades, the Duke became a symbol of the simplistic Western narrative of good versus evil. He not only starred in Oaters, but it was his bread and butter and remains synonymous with the western genre to this day. The same goes for Clint Eastwood, who also made a name for himself playing cowboys and outlaws. But the films Eastwood made were very different from those of his predecessor.

His role as Rowdy Yates on the 1960s CBS series “Rawhide” made him a television star, and is the closest Eastwood comes to portraying the same morally simple characters inhabited by Wayne. However, by the time he played the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s famous “Dollars” trilogy, he was adopting a much more complex anti-heroic philosophy that would define his Western output over the following decades – culminating in 1992 with what is arguably the quintessential revisionist Western, “Unforgiven.” Even though Wayne wasn’t there during that early ’90s triumph, he was there to witness Eastwood’s rise as a pioneer of the revisionist western, and he wasn’t a fan of it.

After Clint Eastwood moved from television to the big screen with “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964, he began to become the face of a changing genre. Westerns traditionally adopted a simple philosophy: good guys versus bad guys, and John Wayne was at the forefront. Eastwood’s Western protagonists were much more morally questionable and this was especially true of 1973’s “High Plains Drifter.”

By this point, Eastwood had starred in the famous Don Siegel film (and controversial) 1971 crime thriller “Dirty Harry.” With “High Plains Drifter” (which hit Netflix in 2025) the actor once again played a morally questionable hero in the form of The Stranger, a mysterious character who arrives in the Wild West town of Lago and metes out his own form of ruthless justice. The film was an early directorial effort from Eastwood, who infused the film with the same revisionist philosophy that had characterized his collaborations with Sergio Leone, but turned it all around 10, deconstructing the cowboy archetype that Wayne had played such a pivotal role in establishing.

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Wayne wrote Eastwood an angry letter about “High Plains Drifter” in which he chastised the young actor for what he claimed was an inaccurate portrayal of the American West. In a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Eastwood recalled Wayne writing, “That’s not what the West was.” It was not the American people who settled there who colonized this country. The actor reflected on receiving the Duke’s missive, saying, “I realized there were two different generations, and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing. ‘High Plains Drifter’ was supposed to be a fable: it wasn’t supposed to show the hours of drudgery of the pioneers. It wasn’t supposed to be about the settlement of the West.”

The 1970s were a fascinating time for the western, beginning with Controversial acid western “El Topo” and ending with the desperate Arnold Schwarzenegger-led Western flop, “The Villain.” During this transformative decade, Clint Eastwood not only established himself as a star, he also established the revisionist western as the de facto form of the genre.

It is therefore not surprising that John Wayne refused to join Eastwood on what would have been an exciting team. Along with Bob Barbash, writer-director Larry Cohen co-wrote a script for the duo called “The Hostiles,” which would have seen Eastwood play a gambler who wins half of a ranch. The other half belonged to an old gunslinger, believed to have been played by Wayne. Unfortunately, as Cohen told author Michael Doyle, author of “Larry Cohen: The Making of Gods and Monsters”, Wayne backed out when offered the chance to star alongside Eastwood in the feature film. Such a film would have depicted Wayne officially anointing the young star as his successor, but the Duke simply wasn’t interested.

A final attempt on Cohen’s part was to send his script to Wayne’s son Michael, who delivered it to his father during a fishing trip. As the screenwriter recalls:

“The next week I called Michael and asked him what happened. He said, ‘Well, Dad was sitting on the boat and I handed him the script. He looked at it for a few minutes, then said, “That shit again!” And then he threw it overboard. I silently said to myself, “Oh, there’s my beautiful script slowly sinking beneath the blue Pacific with the hopes and dreams of Clint Eastwood and Bob Barbash!”

As “John Wayne: the life and the legend” author Scott Eyman wrote: “[Wayne] was sensitive to the drift toward nihilism and probably felt a little threatened. “By the 1970s, Wayne’s era was coming to an end and he surely felt the tectonic cultural shift that turned his simplistic Western formula into a relic. He had also battled cancer and even had a lung removed, not to mention being one of many actors who had damaged their bodies forever, go through immense pain to direct several of his films from the 1970s.

Enough to make the cinema legend wary of this young man, Clint Eastwood. But Wayne also kicked off the ’70s by turning down the lead role in “Dirty Harry.” a decision he belatedly regretted. In Michael Munn’s book “John Wayne: the man behind the myth” The star was quoted as saying: “I thought Harry was a rogue cop. I saw the picture and realized Harry was the kind of role I’d played quite often: a guy who lives by the law but breaks the rules when he really has to to save others.”

When Wayne worked with Don Siegel on “The Shootist” in 1976, the “Dirty Harry” director made a major mistake by telling Wayne to shoot a bad guy in the back because that’s what Clint Eastwood would do. As Eastwood recalled in an episode of Inside the actors’ studio“Wayne turned blue and he said, ‘I don’t care what that kid would have done, I’m not shooting him in the back.'” Interestingly enough, Eastwood ended up visiting the set of “The Shootist,” marking it not only as Wayne’s final on-screen performance, but also the one and only time the two titans of the western genre met.