How This 1956 John Wayne Movie Possibly Led to the Deaths of Nearly Half Its Cast and Crew

A significant portion of the 220 people who worked on the film contracted cancer after filming “The Conquerer”

Shot in the summer of 1954 in Saint George, Utah, the 1956 romance film The Conqueror starred John Wayne and Susan Hayward. Though the film, which was directed by Dick Powell, wasn’t a huge success it is still remembered, albeit for a much darker reason.

More than 20 years after the film was released, children of Wayne, Hayward and Powell would come to an awful realization that working on the film probably caused the cancer that killed their parents — and many other cast and crew members.

An 1980 article from People found that out of the 220 cast and crew members there were 91 who later contracted cancer, with 46 of them (including Wayne, Hayward and Powell) having died from the disease.

From 1951 to 1958, St. George, Utah, was a little over a 100 miles from a nuclear testing site, according to Utah Public Radio, which says “large amounts of debris were drawn up into the atmosphere which contained radioactive substances.”