John Wayne as TE Lawerence in 1953

I see no mention of this anywhere

One thing ill say is had he played him? it would have been a better movie. I like Peter O'Toole but--that movie is overly long and boring at times. Duke would have livened things up a few notches-""that's FOR SURE-that's FER DANG SURE!!!!!!"" little Abner Spudler Battleground.....

Could have been really good or another Conqueror, guess we'll never know.

Hi

As the article points out and if you read Lawrence I couldn't imagine Wayne touching the part with a barge pole. In real life Lawrence was effeminate and weak.
His later troubles when he opted out to joinr the RAF under an assumed name and his ultimate death in a motor accident brought forth the legend but it was based on marsy ground.

Regards

Arthur

Lawrence of Arabia is my favorite movie and I can't think of a single second that should be cut from it. I've seen it five times in the theater and I don't know how many times on DVD/Blu-ray. Peter O'Toole was absolutely magnificent in a star-making role, although he was almost a foot taller than the real-life Lawrence, who in real life was very sensitive on the subject of his height. I can't imagine John Wayne (or any American, for that matter) playing Lawrence -- he was so very very British. His ancestry was actually Scottish and Irish but he was raised for the most part in Oxford.

Like any movie based on history, it plays fast and loose with many of the facts but as cinema -- it is one of the greatest films ever made.

Arthur, I have to disagree with you that Lawrence was "effeminate and weak." He was neither. He was asexual, having a horror of physical contact. He was a brilliant scholar and budding archeologist, which is probably what he would have been all his life if not for World War I. He was also physically very strong, a true self-disciplinarian and very active -- for instance, he rode a bike and walked all over Syria for his masters thesis about Crusader castles. He also loved speed, whether riding his beloved Brough motorcycles after the war or testing speedboats for the British air force during his years as a British airman.

That scene in Lawrence of Arabia where the tribes are crossing the burning desert, and Lawrence nearly kills himself going back for a man who fell off his camel -- that did happen in real life. It took incredible stamina for him to do that.

When the war started and he went into Army service he was first assigned as a mapmaker in Cairo, but then he was sent into the field as an observer and liaison to the Arabs, and he turned out to be a brilliant tactician and guerilla warfare leader.

He endured years of hardship and horrors in the desert during the war, and probably suffered the agony of rape at the hands of the Turks. He felt lifelong guilt at deceiving the Arabs over the Sykes-Picot treaty (in the movie, he is unaware of it -- one of the falsehoods of the film). Like thousands of other veterans, he had what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome, and he came close to suicide, although he did not every attempt it. Instead, he "self-medicated" -- not with booze or drugs, as that would have caused him a loss of his all-important self-control -- but with whippings he paid another man to administer. Eventually he went into the British airforce as an enlisted airman (although he was not like any other airman, really) -- and he went through their basic training, definitely not a easy regimen.

He was beloved of many of the artistic figures of the day, including the great playwright George Bernard Shaw and his wife.

He was strong of body and mind -- the opposite of effeminate and weak -- and did things that very few other men could have done.

I also like the TV movie A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia starring Ralph Fiennes as Lawrence and Alexander Siddig as Feisel. Again, not always factually accurate -- but a very fine portrayal of the two men's relationship.

Maybe the dad wishes his son had been John Wayne.