Film makes one immortal.

Though Paul Newman died last year an old man in his 80s, ravaged by cancer, most remember him as youthful Butch Cassidy, mischievous and beautiful, those sparkling blue eyes the envy of anyone who stared into them. I had the immense pleasure of interviewing Newman in 1999 and let me tell you, it was one of my greatest thrills as a critic.

Of course the interview I long for that will never be would be with John Wayne. I loved the Duke as a kid and championed him in college to an acting teacher who despised him. Little by little I wore her down until she could actually admit, yes, he could act.

Come June, the Duke will have been gone for 30 years, his last public appearance, his shocking one at the Oscars to present best picture to The Deer Hunter (1978), a film he would have hated. He, too, had been torn apart by cancer and, for the first time in his life, John Wayne looked like a mere mortal at that ceremony. Three months later he was gone, his death front-page news around the world.

I was always a fan of the Duke, always believing him to be, in the right role, a fine actor. You cannot imagine the satisfaction I take these days when I read academic essays from film critics praising Wayne's acting talents, and making it clear he was badly under-estimated during his time with us. Hear hear.

True, doing Shakespeare was out of Wayne's element, and he knew that, always acutely aware of what his audiences wanted after the stinging reviews for The Conqueror (1955), in which he portrayed (poorly) Genghis Khan. Wayne was an American and was best in roles as an American, be it a cowboy, a war hero, a big-game hunter or a boxer trying to live his life in peace after killing a man in the ring. His greatest performances were in westerns because no other actor was so at home in the saddle, looked so fine against the landscape or was able to find the depth in the deceptively simplistic stories.

His finest work was as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956), in which he portrayed, shockingly at the time, a racist who goes searching for his niece when her family, (his brother, wife and children) are massacred by Indians who take the girls to raise as their own. They rape and murder the teenager along the way but keep the younger girl, Debbie. Ethan searches across the years for her, his rage building, his hatred growing until it becomes clear to us he has no interest in saving her but will, instead, kill her because she has been defiled by the Indians, in his opinion. Of course, when he comes face to face with her, he cannot, because along the way he has found his own humanity. How he did not win the Oscar for this is beyond me but it remains one of the great oversights in academy history.

He did win, of course, for his wonderful performance as one-eyed, fearless Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969), one of two times he was nominated for an Academy Award, the other being the war film Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). There are many who believe Duke's Oscar was given for sentimental reasons, and maybe so, but I love the performance as much as anything he ever did. A jaunty old warrior riding into battle, that was what he was.

His last performance, and one of his very best, was as J.B. Books in The Shootist (1976) in which he portrayed, with great dignity and sadness, a gunfighter dying of cancer. No one knew at the time Wayne was battling cancer again or that this would be his last performance, only him. Ron Howard told me that working with him was like working with something larger than life, yet a man who knew his impact on people and did his best to put them at ease.

Great acting is finding the truth in the role, and I ask if John Wayne was never anything but real in his best work? He always was. Yep, he made some bad films, but they all do, even Brando.

By my count, Duke should have been nominated for Oscars seven times, winning twice. Nominations should have come for Red River (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), Rio Bravo (1959) and The Shootist, while he should have won for The Searchers and True Grit.

I miss him, despite never knowing or having met him, I miss that there will never be another John Wayne performance. We will never see his like again, and the world is a bit sadder a place because of that.

John Foote, director of the Toronto Film School, is a nationally known film historian/critic and a Port Perry resident. Get more reviews at www.footeonfilm.com. Contact him at jhfoote@xplornet.com.