Born in Los Angeles, he is one of John Wayne's four children by his first wife, Josephine Alicia Saenz, daughter of Panama's Consul General to the U.S. He adopted his father's stage surname, Wayne. He made eleven movies with his father: Rio Grande (1950), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), The Alamo (1960), The Comancheros (1961), Donovan's Reef (1963), McLintock! (1963), The Green Berets (1968) and Big Jake (1971).