Of the roughly 220 cast and crew members who worked on the 1956 historical drama The Conqueror, 91 developed cancer during their lifetimes and 46 died from it, leading to a decades-long debate over whether the film was the victim of a radioactive curse or simply a statistical coincidence. The film, starring John Wayne as Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and directed by Dick Powell, was widely panned by critics, who agreed Wayne was badly miscast in the role. Production took place in Utah at locations including Snow Canyon, Pine Valley, Leeds, and the Escalante Desert near St. George, about 137 miles downwind of the U, S, government’s Nevada National Security Site, where above-ground nuclear weapons testing was active during the period.
In 1953, 11 such tests occurred as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, and the cast and crew spent difficult weeks filming in the area. The filmmakers knew about the nuclear tests, but the federal government had assured residents that they posed no public health hazard. Producer Howard Hughes later shipped 60 tons of dirt from Utah back to Hollywood to match the terrain during studio reshoots, a decision that would later draw scrutiny amid the cancer cluster. Among those who died of cancer was Susan Hayward.
Her doctor discovered a lung tumor in March 1972 that had metastasized, and she was later diagnosed with brain cancer after a seizure in April 1973. She died on March 14, 1975, ather Beverly Hills home, at age 57, and was buried at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Roman Catholic Church cemetery in Carrollton, Georgia. Agnes Moorehead, a non-smoker and health enthusiast, died of uterine cancer on April 30, 1974, in Rochester, Minnesota, at age 73. Her mother Mary survived her and lived to be 106, dying in 1990.
Moorehead is entombed at Dayton Memorial Park in Dayton, Ohio. Lee Van Cleef, who had suffered from heart disease since the late 1970s and had a pacemaker installed in the early 1980s, continued working until he collapsed at his home in Oxnard, California. He died of a heart attack at age 64, with throat cancer listed as a secondary cause of death. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Hollywood Hills.
Dick Powell, the film’s director, was found to have malignant tumors on his neck and chest during tests. He died on January 2, 1963, at age 58, and his remains were interred in the Columbarium of Honor at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. John Hoyt died of lung cancer in Santa Cruz, California, on September 15, 1991, at age 86. Actor Pedro Armendáriz, diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960, took his own life on June 18, 1963 after learning his condition had become terminal.
He was 51 years old. John Wayne himself attributed his stomach cancer to his six-pack-a-day cigarette habit. He enrolled in a cancer vaccine study hoping to ward offthe disease, but died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979, at the UCLA Medical Center, at age 72. He was buried at Pacific View Memorial Park Cemetery in Corona Del Mar, Newport Beach, California.
Several relatives of Wayne and Hayward who visited the set also had cancer scares. Reportedly, Howard Hughes felt guilty about the production decisions, particularly filming at a hazardous site, and bought every print of the film for $12 million, keeping it out of circulation for years until Universal Pictures acquired it from his estate in 1979. The Conqueror, along with Ice Station Zebra, is said to have been one of the films Hughes watched endlessly during his final years. Controversy persists over whether the cancer cases were caused by radiation exposure from the nearby test site.
Statistically, the odds of a man in the U, S, population developing cancer are about 43 percent, and the odds of dying of cancer are 23 percent, figures very close to those observed among the film’s cast and crew. Whether the cluster represents a curse or coincidence remains unresolved.
