John Wayne made a lot of movies with a lot of actors, starring alongside the likes of Jimmy Stewart, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Maureen O’Hara, Kirk Douglas, and Katherine Hepburn, and that barely even scratches the surface of the stars he worked with.
Despite this, Wayne’s best co-star is actually a horse named Dollor, who was with him in all of his Westerns from 1971’s Big Jake until his retirement. Their partnership culminated in Don Siegel’s The Shootist in 1976, when Wayne insisted on script changes so that he could call the horse by its name, finally passing Dollor on to a young Ron Howard.
Is it Dollar or Dollor?
In the later stages of his career, The Duke found a horse that would be the last one he would ride in a movie. There is a lot of conflicting information swirling around about what movies this particular horse was in, but unfortunately IMDb doesn’t have a list of credits for horses, making it a little tough to pinpoint where it all started.
It’s even pretty tough to tell if the horse was named Dollar or Dollor. A lot of sources claim that 1969’s True Grit was the first to feature Dollor, not throughout the bulk of the movie but at the end after Wayne’s character Rooster Cogburn has to replace Beau, who dies in the climactic shootout.
While he does indeed get a new horse, and one that looks very similar to Dollor, it is actually a different horse completely — adding to the confusion, this horse is possibly named Dollar. Beau had a distinctive wide white blaze down his face with a small deviation over the right eye, so when Cogburn turns up with a new sorrel gelding with a thin white blaze many think this is Dollor, however the blaze is wider at the top on this horse’s face and gets thinner towards the nose, while Dollor’s starts thin and gets wider at the nose.
Beau is the mount Wayne uses in his next few Westerns, but it is in the 1971 George Sherman film Big Jake that Dollor made his debut
He is then featured in every western that Wayne makes until his retirement, namely The Cowboys, The Train Robbers, Cahill, Rooster Cogburn, and The Shootist. It’s interesting that it was in this late stage of his career that Wayne became so strongly taken with a horse when he had been riding them his whole life.
According to a Chicago Tribune article, Wayne was so enamored with Dollor that he had a contract drawn up with the owner, Dick Webb Movie Productions, to ensure no one else could ride the horse on film. Wayne also stipulated that the script for The Shootist be changed to allow him to refer to Dollor by name, specifically calling him Ol’ Dollor repeatedly.