In 1947, before either of the films in which he could have died were made, John Wayne’s wife nearly murdered him. Esperanza Baur, drunk and in a jealous rage, shot at the movie star with a pistol, but missed. Probably not surprisingly, they eventually divorced. More than a decade after Baur tried to shoot Wayne, the actor had an even closer brush with death. On December 26, 1963, while filming a scene in Spain for “Circus World,” a period piece about an American circus touring Europe, he barely escaped with his life.
In the scene, Wayne was supposed to rush into the more than 100-yard-long circus tent and put out a fire, but just as the cameras began to roll, the wind kicked up and the flames suddenly spread. Amid the intense heat and billowing smoke, he was still in character and apparently unaware of just how dangerous the fire was. He also hadn’t heard the director, Henry Hathaway, tell everyone to leave. Wayne remained inside while the rest of the cast and crew fled. When he finally realized just how serious it was, he got out. Wayne was coughing horribly and his eyes were red from the smoke. Members of the special effects crew quickly extinguished the blaze. “If they had not flushed out the downdraft flames, the whole tent would have burned and come down on all of us,” Hathaway told the Associated Press afterward. “It was a narrow escape.”
