Maybe, just maybe, the curse is finally off Bruce Dern’s career — the curse that has plagued him for four decades as the guy who shot John Wayne.

After all, the laurels are mounting these days for the 77-year-old actor, thanks to his performance in Nebraska as a cantankerous dad who believes he has struck it big in the sweepstakes. A recent Golden Globe nomination shines bright as does the prospect of a future Oscar nomination.

But this is happening in the twilight of a troubled career that has seen Dern give other fine performances yet never receive his due. His friend and contemporary, Jack Nicholson, once called Dern the finest actor of their generation.

And as long ago as 1978, the Academy Awards bestowed a best supporting actor nomination on him for his work in Coming Home as Jane Fonda’s seriously troubled husband. Yet even that moment of achievement also reinforced the continuing perception of him as a Hollywood bad guy of a particularly creepy sort.

He knows that his career never recovered from The Cowboys, the 1972 western that saw him shoot John Wayne in the back. And lately Dern has spoken more openly about the day that scene was filmed — recalling that Wayne, hammered on Wild Turkey, sidled up to him, and said. “Oh, they’re gonna hate you for this.”

And the public did. Dern told me 10 years ago that he lost count of the number of times some guy would stop him on the street or in a restaurant or store, and say, “You killed my buddy!” He had a ready response: “No. Excuse me, he died of cancer. It was just a movie.” But that defence never really worked. And sometimes those encounters were downright scary — especially for an actor who had started receiving death threats just days after the release of The Cowboys.

Thanks to a technical glitch, my 2003 interview with the Dern never appeared. But I remember clearly the pain that crossed his face when I mentioned The Cowboys. I also remember his stoicism as he went on to discuss the career damage he had suffered as a result.

That day, Dern was supposed to be discussing his supporting role in Monster, the film that would win co-star Charlize Theron an Oscar. But it was The Cowboys that opened a floodgate of memory — back to a watershed year in which he made two career decisions, one good, one really bad.

There was his first real starring role as a galactic greenhouse keeper in the cult science fiction movie, Silent Running. Signing for that project was the good decision. But Silent Running proved incapable of advancing his career — not with The Cowboys overshadowing it that same year.

Dern wasn’t mincing words: Accepting the role of the slimy, slack-jawed Long Hair in The Cowboys was the worst career choice he ever made, because he ended up messing around with the John Wayne mythology and the Duke’s image of invincibility.

“When I first came to town, (Robert) Redford, (Warren) Beatty, George Hamilton, Clint (Eastwood) — they were the real leading men. As for Jack and I and Dustin (Hoffman) and (Robert) De Niro and everyone else — we were ‘characters’ who were also allowed to become movie stars because in the Seventies they still made movies about folks on the ‘outside.’ That’s where we lucked out.”