Biography
L I F E

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1908 - 1997

American Actor / Film Star / Legend / Icon

Jimmy Stewart was one of the most trusted and beloved of American actors, a star who now arouses great public affection chiefly because of his comedies, It's a Wonderful Life, and his artful hesitation in talk shows towards the end of his life. His body of mature films, made during the 1950s for Hitchcock and Anthony Mann, while generally presenting him as a troubled, querulous, or lonely personality, clearly play on the immense reputation for charm that his early films had won. Thus Stewart is one of the most intriguing examples of a star cast increasingly against his accepted character. The emotional subtlety of films like The Naked Spur, Rear Window, The Far Country, The Man from Laramie, and Vertigo derives from the way in which we are intrigued by the contradictions in Stewart himself, between hardness and vulnerability. Who can forget his nightmare in The Naked Spur, or his cries of distress?

Yet in the years before the war, Stewart was pre-eminently a diffident, wide-eyed, drawling innocent, a country boy who had wandered into a crazily sophisticated world. After a brief foray as a heavy in Rose Marie (36, W. S. Van Dyke) and After the Thin Man (36, Van Dyke)— he settled down as a romantic lead and an honest crusader, thriving on grassroots virtues of honour and simplicity long forgotten by Hollywood's lounge lizards.

Stewart had studied architecture at Princeton before he joined a theatrical company led by Joshua Logan and also including Henry Fonda. He worked steadily in the theatre until 1935 when he made his debut in The Murder Man (Tim Whelan) on an MGM contract. He was loaned to Universal for Next Time We Love (36, Edward H. Griffith), opposite Margaret Sullavan, and his own studio gave him supporting parts: Wife vs. Secretary (36, Clarence Brown); Small Town Girl (36, William Wellman); and The Gorgeous Hussy (36, Clarence Brown). He had the lead opposite Eleanor Powell and sang (with very thin voice) in Born to Dance (36, Roy del Ruth) and then played with Simone Simon in Seventh Heaven (37, Henry King). He had more support work in The Last Gangster (37, Edward Ludwig), Navy Blue and Gold (37, Sam Wood), and Of Human Hearts (38, Brown), before finding his place in romantic comedies: Vivacious Lady (38, George Stevens); as the Texan soldier who meets Margaret Sullavan in New York in The Shopworn Angel (38, H. C. Potter); and Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You (38).

He followed these with Made for Each Other (39, John Cromwell); It's a Wonderful World (39, Van Dyke); the classical early Stewart role, Jefferson Smith, in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (39); the taciturn cowboy taming Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (39, George Marshall); two more clever pairings with Margaret Sullavan—a wise Lubitsch comedy, The Shop Around the Corner (40) and Frank Borzage's The Mortal Storm (40)—one of cinema's best two-shots is Sullavan reclining and inspecting the shining diffidence of a young Stewart; a rather generous best actor Oscar in The Philadelphia Story (40, George Cukor).

His popularity was undoubtedly enhanced by a distinguished war record in the air force—a record later invoked in Anthony Mann's Strategic Air Command (55). After the war, Stewart left MGM and free-lanced for several years: one of his favorite roles, George Bailey, in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (46), a picture that caught the first hint of frenzy and gloom; Wellman's Magic Town (47); the reporter in Call Northside 777 (48, Henry Hathaway); and his first Hitchcock movie, the relentlessly interior Rope (48), playing a rather monotonous seeker-out of truth.

Briefly, his career faltered, but in 1950 he went to Universal to make Winchester 73 (Anthony Mann) and to Fox for Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves). He then made two movies for Henry Koster that successfully reworked his shy charm: Harvey (50) and No Highway (51). But the Western—especially the unexpected intensity he had revealed in Winchester 73 —now claimed him. After playing the clown in De Mille's The Greatest Show on Earth (52), Stewart struck an innovatory contract with Universal whereby he took a percentage of his films' profits.

It was this deal that allowed Stewart and Anthony Mann to make Bend of the River (52); Thunder Bay (53); The Glenn Miller Story (54); and The Far Country (54). Curiously, The Naked Spur, made with Mann in 1953, and looking like a Universal Western, is an MGM picture. These Westerns redefined Stewart's character: he was now revealed as a tougher, more pained and selfish man, who was often made to suffer and put to a brutal test of courage and wounding. It was the more of an achievement since, as Glenn Miller Stewart was as homely, sentimental, and appealing as ever.

In 1954, Hitchcock pounced on this new Stewart and put him in a wheelchair as the voyeur photographer in Rear Window (54) while in 1955, at Columbia, Mann and Stewart made another Western, The Man from Laramie, which dealt especially well with the effect of violence on Stewart. The scene in which Alex Nicol maims Stewart's hand, and Stewart's swooning reaction, introduce a new frankness about violence in American films. Hitchcock used him in the much simpler central tral role in The Man Who Knew Too Much (55) and Billy Wilder made an inexplicable failure with Stewart playing Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis (57). Inexplicable by the fact that Stewart by then far too old (49) to play Lindbergh who had been 25 at the time of the flight.

Despite every hint of the darker side of Stewart, Hitchcock's Vertigo (58) was still a surprise. A masterpiece by any terms, Stewart's portrayal of the detective who loses his nerve and then becomes entranced by the two forms of a mythic Kim Novak is frightening in its intensity: a far cry from a man who talked to rabbits.

But as if to assert versatility, Stewart then returned (with Novak) to middle-aged comedy in Richard Quine's Bell, Book and Candle (58). Perhaps his last major role, and one played with comfortable fraudulence, was the country lawyer in Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (59). Thereafter, mannerism, laziness, and indifference set in, perhaps encouraged by John Ford who tolerated a growing self-indulgence in Two Rode Together (61); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (62); as Wyatt Earp in Cheyenne Autumn (64). Otherwise, Stewart tried to revive his 1930 comedy character in some very dull movies and surrendered to knockabout Westerns that are sad indeed when one recalls the cold, laconic hero of Mann's films: How the West Was Won (62, Hathaway); Shenandoah (65, Andrew V. McLaglen); Firecreek (67, Vincent McEveety); Bandolero! (68, McLaglen); The Cheyenne Social Club (70, Gene Kelly); and Dynamite Man from Glory Jail (71, McLaglen). Only Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (65) used Stewart honestly—as a harassed, elderly, and old-fashioned pilot in a crisis. All too briefly, he was compelled to tell John Wayne his negative prognosis in The Shootist (76, Don Siegel): a case of the doctor looking less hearty than the patient.

Stewart was a very frail General Sternwood in the awful remake of The Big Sleep (78, Michael Winner), giving up the ghost in a film and filmmaker not worthy of him. Somehow, I think there should have been a health warning given to great actors who worked with Winner. It wasn't any good for the health of those just watching a Winner film so how bad was it for the career of such an iconic actor appearing in his rubbish? Winner was the Ed Wood of his day but without Wood's meticulous attention to detail, his painstaking slowness in search of perfection, his flair, charm, ability or sense of humour. In fact a poor man's Ed Wood so poor that he still owes Mr Wood a fiver.

Stewart looked fitter in The Magic of Lassie (78, Don Chaffey). He then made Afurika Monogatari (81, Susumu Hani) and Right of Way (83, George Schaefer), with Bette Davis.

His beloved wife of 45 years, Gloria Stewart, died in 1994, a loss which left Stewart an emotional shell of his former self. He retreated into a semi-reclusive lifestyle, rarely leaving his bedroom and not answering old friends' calls or letters and instructing his housekeeper to turn them away when they came to visit.

Finally, he died in Los Angeles in 1997 of a pulmonary blood clot, three years after his wife. Over 3,000 people (mostly Hollywood celebrities) went to his funeral to pay respects.