Jimmy Stewart

James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, a small county seat in the western part of the state ^[1]. His father, Alexander Stewart, ran the family hardware store, a business that had served the town since the middle of the nineteenth century, and his mother, Elizabeth Ruth Jackson, played the organ and encouraged music in the household. The Stewarts were Presbyterians with a long record of military service, and both of James's grandfathers had fought in the Civil War ^[2].

The hardware store shaped the boy's early world. He worked behind the counter, absorbed his father's plainspoken manner, and developed the unhurried speech that later became his trademark. As a child he built model airplanes and followed the exploits of early aviators with fascination, an enthusiasm that never left him ^[1].

Stewart attended Mercersburg Academy, a preparatory school in southern Pennsylvania, where he acted in school productions and played on the track team. In 1928 he entered Princeton University, where he studied architecture and earned his degree in 1932. At Princeton he joined the Triangle Club, the university's musical comedy troupe, and his performances there drew the attention of classmates who were already pointing toward careers in the theater ^[2].

After graduation Stewart joined the University Players, a summer stock company in Falmouth, Massachusetts, whose members included Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. Fonda became his lifelong friend, and the two shared an apartment in New York while scratching out livings on the Broadway stage during the depths of the Depression ^[3].

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scout signed Stewart in 1935, and he moved to Hollywood, where he again roomed with Fonda. His early film assignments were small, but directors soon noticed how naturally he played ordinary men. Frank Capra cast him in You Can't Take It with You in 1938, and the following year gave him the role that defined his prewar image: the idealistic young senator Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which earned Stewart his first Academy Award nomination ^[1].

In 1940 he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story, playing a cynical reporter softened by an unexpected romance. The performance won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1941 ^[4]. Stewart reportedly sent the statuette home to Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father displayed it in the hardware store window for years ^[2].

Stewart had earned a private pilot's license in 1935 and a commercial license before the war, logging hundreds of flying hours at his own expense. Drafted in 1940 but initially rejected for being underweight, he persisted and was inducted into the Army in March 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, becoming the first major American movie star to enter uniform for the Second World War ^[5].

He resisted efforts to keep him stateside making training films and selling war bonds. By 1943 he had won assignment to a combat unit, and he deployed to England with the 445th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force. Flying B-24 Liberator bombers, Stewart led missions over Germany and occupied Europe, serving as squadron commander and later as group operations officer. He flew 20 official combat missions and earned decorations including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Croix de Guerre ^[5].

Stewart rarely discussed his combat experience in public, and colleagues noted that the war changed him. He remained in the Air Force Reserve after 1945, continued to train and fly, and was promoted to brigadier general in 1959, the highest rank ever attained by a Hollywood actor in the American military. He retired from the reserve in 1968 ^[6].

Stewart returned to Hollywood in 1945 uncertain whether audiences still wanted him. His first postwar film answered the question in a way no one predicted. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), in which Stewart played the despairing small-town banker George Bailey, was a box office disappointment on release but grew through television reruns into one of the most beloved films ever made in America. Stewart often called it his personal favorite ^[1].

The postwar years revealed a darker, more complicated actor. In a string of Westerns directed by Anthony Mann, beginning with Winchester '73 in 1950, Stewart played hardened, sometimes vengeful men, a sharp break from his earlier boyish roles ^[3]. His deal on Winchester '73, negotiated by agent Lew Wasserman, gave him a percentage of the profits instead of a flat salary, an arrangement widely credited with reshaping how Hollywood stars were paid ^[4].

His collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock produced some of the most studied films in American cinema: Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). In the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll, Vertigo was voted the greatest film ever made ^[7]. Stewart also drew acclaim for Harvey (1950), in which he played the gentle Elwood P. Dowd and his invisible six-foot rabbit, and for Otto Preminger's courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), which brought him his fifth and final Best Actor nomination ^[1]. Any account of Jimmy Stewart achievements must also note his Golden Globe and lifetime honors, including the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1980 and an honorary Academy Award in 1985 ^[4].

For his first four decades Stewart was one of Hollywood's most eligible bachelors, linked in the press to actresses including Ginger Rogers and Olivia de Havilland. That ended in August 1949, when he married Gloria Hatrick McLean, a former model and divorced mother of two sons, Ronald and Michael, whom Stewart adopted. The couple had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, in 1951, and their marriage lasted 45 years until Gloria's death in 1994 ^[2].

The family suffered a grievous loss in 1969 when Ronald McLean, serving as a Marine lieutenant, was killed in action in Vietnam ^[6]. Stewart, a lifelong Republican and a supporter of the war, bore the loss quietly and continued his public advocacy for the armed services.

Away from the studio Stewart lived with notable restraint for a movie star. He and Gloria stayed in the same Beverly Hills house for decades, traveled widely, especially to Africa, and supported causes including the Boy Scouts and his hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania, which opened the Jimmy Stewart Museum in his honor in 1995 ^[8]. He also published a slim volume of light verse, Jimmy Stewart and His Poems, in 1989, which became a bestseller after he read one of the poems on The Tonight Show ^[2].

Film roles thinned in the 1960s and 1970s as tastes changed, though Stewart kept working steadily. He starred in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) opposite John Wayne, appeared in ensemble pictures such as How the West Was Won, and took character parts, including a turn in The Shootist (1976), Wayne's final film ^[3]. Two television series bearing his name, a sitcom in 1971 and the legal drama Hawkins in 1973, had short runs, though Hawkins won him a Golden Globe ^[4].

His last major screen appearances came in the disaster film Airport '77 and in The Magic of Lassie (1978), and his final performance was as the voice of the dog Wylie Burp in the animated feature An American Tail: Fievel Goes West in 1991 ^[1]. In 1983 he underwent surgery for skin cancer, and hearing loss increasingly kept him from acting.

Gloria's death from lung cancer in February 1994 devastated him. Friends said he withdrew almost completely, rarely leaving the house. James Stewart died of cardiac arrest following a pulmonary embolism on July 2, 1997, at his home in Beverly Hills, at the age of 89. He was buried beside Gloria at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California ^[6].

Anyone asking who was Jimmy Stewart will find the answer split between two careers, either of which would have distinguished a life. As an actor he received five Academy Award nominations, won once, and left a filmography that critics rank among the finest of any American performer. The American Film Institute placed him third on its 1999 list of the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood, behind only Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant ^[4].

His military record gave his screen image an authority no studio publicity could manufacture. Audiences knew that the man playing George Bailey had flown bombers through flak over Germany, and that knowledge deepened the trust he inspired. Scholars of American film often treat his postwar performances, with their currents of anger, obsession, and doubt, as a register of what the war did to the men who fought it ^[3].

Every December, television broadcasts of It's a Wonderful Life renew his hold on American popular culture, and Vertigo continues to anchor academic study of Hitchcock and of film itself ^[7]. In Indiana, Pennsylvania, a statue of Stewart stands outside the county courthouse and the Jimmy Stewart Museum preserves his story for visitors ^[8]. Among the enduring Jimmy Stewart facts is perhaps the simplest: he remained, by nearly every account of those who knew him, the same courteous small-town man the movies always said he was.