135 title movies! This actor is the absolute record holder of leading roles in cinema

With 135 major feature films made between 1930 and 1976, and accordingly ColliderThe actor with the most leading roles is John Wayne! The number 135 may not seem like much, because there are actors with much richer filmography, such as Danny Trejo, Michael Madsen, Eric Roberts and many Bollywood actors. But if they sometimes make 12 films in the same year, most of the time they are supporting roles.

Similarly, Bruce Willis technically has over 140 films, but in the later years of his career, he only appeared in most of them for a few minutes.

How did he do it?

In 1930, John Wayne played the lead role in Raoul Walsh’s Western The Trail of the Giants. He made several small films while working for B-series studios Leon Schlesinger Studios, Lone Star Productions, and Republic Pictures, making 7 to 11 westerns a year, all titles.

This continued until 1939, a decade long, when director John Ford cast Wayne in the film Fantastic Ride, which was a huge success. The western marks the first collaboration between the two men, who would go on to sign twelve other films together, not including Conquest of the West, a “segment” film.

Fantastic Ride allows John Wayne to leave the B series and reach mid-budget “A” movies (like Skimmers) and then big-budget prestige A movies like Rio Bravo, while still holding the lead.

An anecdote to impress your friends, even the most knowledgeable

John Wayne is said to have appeared in eight John Ford films made between 1927 and 1930, always as background extras and almost a decade before Fantastic Ride, but these roles are hard to find. You can have fun looking for it, here, for example, in The Butcher’s House (1928):

If John Wayne remains at the top of the bill, it is mainly thanks to the character he portrayed on screen in his westerns – to the point where he sometimes wears the same suit from film to film – and his “tough” attitude. Whoever doesn’t let the bad guys do the math and won’t let injustice go unpunished. America fantasized about flesh and blood.