james stewart

James Maitland Stewart was born Indiana, Pennsylvania on March 20, 1908.  His father ran a family hardware store.  He attended Mercersburg Academy prep school in preparation for attending Princeton University.  While attending Princeton, he excelled academically but, upon graduation, turned down a graduate scholarship in architecture.  Instead, he joined the University Players, a small acting company performing on Cape Cod.  The group also included Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan, who became his close friends.

After performing with the University Players during the summer of 1932, he moved on to New York where he found several small roles on Broadway.  He considered returning to his studies before being cast in the lead role in Yellow Jack in 1934.  The play was critically praised but folded after only a few months.  Nevertheless, he continued to find work including his first screen appearance, an uncredited role in the short film Art Trouble (1934), featuring soon to be stooge, Shemp Howard.

In 1935, Stewart signed a seven year contract with MGM.  His first Hollywood role was a small part in The Murder Man (1935), starring Spencer Tracy.  MGM did not see him as a leading man due to his mannerisms and despite his boyish charm.  They began loaning him out to other studios where he began to land numerous roles.  Most significantly, his friend Margaret Sullavan urged Universal to cast him as her leading man in Next Time We Love (1936).  The film was a box office success and, along with After the Thin Man (1936), showed that his career was on the rise.  He became a major star when he was loaned out to Columbia Pictures for Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938). 

Over the next several years, Stewart made some of his most memorable films.  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was the third highest grossing film in 1939, a year often considered the greatest in Hollywood history.  The film also earned his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor.  The western parody Destry Rides Again (1939) was also well-received.  The Philadelphia Story (1940) (Read Our Review) in which he starred alongside Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor.  Stewart always considered his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to be his finest and commented that his win for The Philadelphia Story was the academy making up for not giving him the award for that film.

When World War II broke out, Stewart enlisted in the Army Air Corps. While he initially enlisted a private, his status as a college graduate and licensed commercial pilot led to being commissioned as a second lieutenant.  Stewart served with great distinction during the war, flying bombing missions over Germany and rising to the rank of colonel.  He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, the French Croix de Guerre and the Air Medal.  After the war, he continued in a reserve role and eventually was promoted to brigadier general, the highest rank ever achieved by an American actor. 

Stewart briefly considered retiring to Pennsylvania after the war but returned to Hollywood to star in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).  It is hard to imagine that a film so engrained in American culture was not well-received at the time, but the film received mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office.  It earned five Academy Award nominations including another Best Actor nomination for Stewart but led to bankruptcy for Frank Capra’s production company.  Another underappreciated film was his first collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948), where many thought Stewart was miscast as a cynical professor. 

Stewart received his fourth Academy Award nomination for Harvey (1950), a screen adaptation of the popular Broadway play.  However, successful collaborations with two directors defined Stewart’s career during the 1950s.  He began the decade with two successful Westerns directed by Anthony Mann.  Winchester 73 (1950) and Broken Arrow (1950) were the first of many collaborations with Mann.  Others included the Westerns Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), Strategic Air Command (1955) and The Man from Laramie (1955).  All were successful at the box office.  

At the same time, Stewart continued his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock with Rear Window (1954) (Read Our Review), which became the third highest grossing film of the year and showed a new side to an actor everyone thought they knew.  Additional collaborations with Hitchcock included a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955) and Vertigo (1958).  Like It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo was not well received at the time but is now considered a classic film and one of Hitchcock’s best.  Hitchcock felt that Stewart was simply too old to play the love interest in the film and did not cast Stewart in his next film, North by Northwest (1959).  Stewart had wanted the role famously played by Cary Grant.  Instead, Stewart closed out the decade by earning his fourth Academy Award nomination for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). 

Now in his fifties, Stewart continued to star in successful films.  He appeared in the first segment of the epic How the West Was Won (1962) and the classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).  He played a major supporting role in The Shootist (1976), which turned out to be John Wayne’s final film.  By the 1980s he was mostly retired from acting although he continued to make television appearances as well as commercial voiceovers.  He died on July 2, 1997, at the age of 89. 

James Stewart was often described as a natural and instinctive actor.  He often played an “everyman”, an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances.  Audiences identified with him as one of them as opposed to a constructed on-screen hero.  Interestingly, this persona as an everyman contributed to the success of films where he played darker characters that contrasted with audience preconceptions of his innocence and charm.