With a drawling voice, a lanky frame and an honesty that felt unforced, James Stewart became the actor audiences trusted — the ordinary man who stood up when it mattered most.
James Stewart was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on 20 May 1908, the son of a hardware store owner. He studied architecture at Princeton University, but the theatre drew him away, and by the early 1930s he was working on Broadway. He moved to Hollywood in 1935, and within a few years he was one of the industry’s most popular leading men.
Stewart’s breakthrough came with a run of films that defined his screen image: the earnest young senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the witty reporter in The Philadelphia Story (1940), and, after the Second World War, the despairing George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). During the war he served in the United States Army Air Forces, flying combat missions in Europe, an experience that deepened the seriousness he brought to his later work.
In the 1950s Stewart reinvented himself. With director Anthony Mann he made a series of westerns, including Winchester ’73 (1950), in which he played a harder, more troubled hero. With Alfred Hitchcock he explored obsession and guilt in Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). He could still be funny, as in Harvey (1950), in which he played a man whose best friend is an invisible rabbit, but he was no longer only the innocent young man of the 1930s.
Stewart continued acting into the 1970s and 1980s, and he remained a beloved figure long after he retired from the screen. He died in Beverly Hills, California, on 2 July 1997. His legacy is that of a star who never lost the common touch: he played decency without making it dull, and courage without making it loud.