If we can scale down the pantheon of 20th-century actors to those with screen personas so resonant that their images remain available via plaster busts and lamps still sold in novelty stores decades after their deaths, John Wayne, the subject of a centenary exhibition of films starting today at the Museum of Modern art, shares that particular down-market upper tier with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean alone.

Wayne’s big-hearted, tough-guy screen persona was just as much a creation as Dean’s tortured eternal adolescent and Monroe’s breathless innocent sex pot. And like those two, Wayne’s future persona was a natural reaction to a less-than-ideal childhood. He was born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa 100 years ago. His father was a good-natured but heavy-drinking pharmacist married to a hot-tempered Irish wife who doted on a younger son, Robert, whom she had not seen fit to socially handicap with the name Marion.

Wayne sought the validation that didn’t exist behind the lace curtains of home in the great outdoors, first in Iowa, then in California, where his father’s health and fortunes and his parent’s marriage failed. When a Glendale fireman dubbed him “Little Duke,” young Marion gratefully accepted the nickname, even if “Big Duke” was the family Airedale terrier. The broad shouldered, 6-foot-4-inch stature he inherited from his mother’s stock helped him shake the “little,” and his gridiron prowess with the USC Trojans got him noticed by cowboy star Tom Mix.

The MoMA tribute begins with Duke’s debut star turn and first credit as John Wayne in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 early widescreen pioneer epic “The Big Trail.” Walsh renamed his discovery, who’d been toiling in late1920s Hollywood as an actor and a prop man, after the revolutionary war hero “Mad Anthony” Wayne. Though he would himself become the architect of the more emotionally three-dimensional “psychological Westerns” of the ’50s via 1948’s “Pursued,” Walsh needed a hit and “The Big Trail,” though gorgeous to look at, is unadorned with ambiguities. It was a good fit for its star. Breck Coleman, the young scout played by Wayne in “The Big Trail,” embodied an outin-the-open, right or wrong, mitigation free world that Wayne invoked in many of the films he would later produce — the exact opposite of the brooding, suffocating household the actor was raised in. “The cowboy,” Wayne declared decades later, “had no nuances.”

When “The Big Trail” failed at the box office, Wayne spent the better part of a decade playing cowboys of the nuance-free variety in cheap B-Westerns. It took director John Ford to finely etch Wayne’s cowboy persona with scratches and cracks that allowed tantalizing glimpses of the angry, hurt, and unloved “Marion” within. Appropriately, the bulk of the MoMA retrospective is drawn from the nearly two-dozen films that Ford and Wayne made together.

What Wayne brought to the table, and what Ford, along with Howard Hawks, Henry Hathaway, and the few other directors the star didn’t intimidate occasionally revealed, was empathy. Like any child of alcoholism, Wayne had sensitivity in spades, and like any child of scorn, that sensitivity was more a curse than a blessing. It’s empathy that fills the wings of the dark angel Ethan Edwards, the seething, violent heart of Ford’s deservedly storied 1956 film “The Searchers.” To the film’s fans, Wayne’s skill makes Ethan real; to its detractors, the actor’s open identification with a racist, murdering character renders the film appalling.

Monroe and Dean were both advocates of the inside-out schools of acting that Konstantin Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg advocated. When asked to describe his technique, Wayne simply said, “I read what’s in the script and then go out there and deliver my lines.” But for much of his prime ticket-selling years, Wayne, like Monroe, worked with his own acting guru. “He worked with coaches,” a co-star, the pedigreed New York theater actor Marc Lawrence, recalled during a mid-’90s interview in Film Comment magazine. “Someone to work with him on the side, explain the scene to him.” According to most Wayne biographers, it was actor and coach Paul Fix who helped Wayne mold the distinctive rolling walk and snarling drawl that helped the actor hold his own in “True Grit” alongside Robert Duvall and Jack Nicholson’s own acting teacher, Jeff Corey.

In her recent book “Truth: Personas, Needs, and Flaws in Building Actors and Creating Characters,” the author Susan Batson, a celebrated acting coach whose clients include Nicole Kidman and Juliet Binoche, summed up Wayne’s place in a post-Brando world. “When a role lined up with his personality, Wayne displayed flashes of vulnerability,” Ms. Batson writes. “The Oscar Wayne won for ‘True Grit,'” she concludes, “was as much for the eye-patch as for his personality.”

On Oscar night in 1969, Wayne wholeheartedly agreed. “Wow,” he said as he took the statuette from Barbra Streisand. “If I’d known what I know now, I’d have put a patch on my eye 35 years ago.”

But John Wayne’s continued resonance, his curiously brittle and angry magnetism, go deeper than even Wayne himself seemed to be conscious of. In his best roles, Wayne found a compelling intersection of myth and history, arrogance and innocence, at a place inside himself where Marion ended and the Duke began.

Through June 30 (11 W. 53 St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).