He was the most decorated actor ever to serve in the American military, a brigadier general who flew bombing missions over Nazi Germany and never once used it for publicity. He stammered, blushed, and apologized to cameramen for wasting film. He was married to the same woman for 45 years, wrote poetry about his dog, and wept openly when he talked about his friends. James Stewart (1908–1997) spent half a century being the most famous “ordinary man” in the world — and the most extraordinary thing about him was how little of it was acting.
Indiana, Pennsylvania: The Hardware Store Boy
James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the eldest child of Alexander and Elizabeth Stewart. His father ran the family hardware store — J.M. Stewart and Company, founded by his grandfather — and the Stewarts were pillars of their small town: Presbyterian, Republican, civic-minded, the kind of family that believed a man’s word was his bond. Young Jimmy was shy to the point of pain, a gangly boy with a stammer who found refuge in two things: building model airplanes and performing magic tricks. He was also, improbably, an excellent accordion player.
His father had served in the Spanish-American War and World War I, and military service was a family expectation, not a choice. But first came Princeton, where Stewart studied architecture, graduating in 1932. He had no intention of becoming an actor — until he fell in with the university’s theater crowd, including a lanky classmate named Joshua Logan, who would become a famous Broadway director. Logan cast Stewart in campus productions, and something clicked. The shy boy who stammered in conversation found that on stage, the stammer became timing, the shyness became vulnerability, and audiences leaned in to listen.
After Princeton, Stewart followed Logan into summer stock and then to Broadway, where he met his lifelong best friend: a young actor named Henry Fonda. The two were opposites in temperament — Fonda intense and brooding, Stewart easygoing and self-deprecating — but they recognized in each other the same Midwestern seriousness. They became roommates in New York, then in Hollywood, splitting rent and dreams. Their friendship would last 50 years, surviving fame, rivalry, politics, and everything else Hollywood throws at friendships. When Fonda died in 1982, Stewart — who rarely showed emotion in public — was visibly shattered.
The War: What He Did When the Cameras Stopped
Stewart arrived in Hollywood in 1935 and was a star within five years. Then, in March 1941 — nine months before Pearl Harbor — he did something almost no star of his magnitude did: he enlisted in the Army Air Corps as a private. He was 32, wealthy, famous, and could easily have spent the war making training films. Instead, he fought his superiors for combat duty, trained as a bomber pilot, and by 1943 was flying B-24 Liberators with the 445th Bombardment Group out of England.
He flew twenty combat missions over Germany — through flak so thick pilots said you could walk on it — and rose to chief of staff of the 2nd Combat Bombardment Wing, then to full colonel. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, and the French Croix de Guerre. The men who served under him remembered a commander who flew the toughest missions himself and never asked anyone to take a risk he wouldn’t take. He came home in 1945 with the weight of the friends who hadn’t — and he carried it, quietly, for the rest of his life.
What makes Stewart’s service remarkable is not just the heroism but the silence. He almost never spoke about the war in interviews. He didn’t write a memoir trading on it. When he continued in the Air Force Reserve after the war — eventually rising to brigadier general in 1959, the highest-ranking actor in American military history — he did it without fanfare. In 1966, at age 58, he flew a combat mission over Vietnam as an observer in a B-52, because he felt he should understand what the younger men were going through. The Pentagon had to be talked into letting him go.
Those who knew him said the war explained everything about the post-war Stewart: the gravity behind the charm, the tears that came so easily in It’s a Wonderful Life, the darkness Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock found in him. He had seen what the world could do, and he had decided — deliberately, daily — to be kind anyway.
The Stammer, the Shyness, and the Craft
Stewart’s famous drawl and hesitation were not entirely an act. He did stammer as a boy, and he remained a genuinely shy man — uncomfortable with fame, awkward at parties, the star who would rather be home. But like all great actors, he alchemized his limitations into technique. The halting speech became a way of thinking on screen; audiences watched Stewart’s characters arrive at their convictions in real time, word by painful word, and loved them for the effort. The lanky physicality — the hands that never knew what to do with themselves — became a language of decency under pressure.
Directors adored working with him because he was prepared, punctual, and egoless. Frank Capra said Stewart was the only actor he never had to direct twice. Alfred Hitchcock, not known for praising actors, called him a thorough professional. Billy Wilder, who directed him in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), said Stewart was “the best listener in Hollywood.” He treated crews with a respect that was legendary — he knew electricians’ names, thanked extras, and never pulled rank. In an industry built on ego, Stewart’s lack of it was almost disorienting.
Gloria: The Love of His Life
For years, Stewart was Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor — linked in the gossip columns with Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, and others, but never settling. Friends joked he was married to his career and his friendship with Fonda. Then, in 1948, at a dinner party, he met Gloria Hatrick McLean, a former model with two young sons from a previous marriage. Stewart, then 40, fell completely. They married on August 9, 1949, and the bachelor was gone for good.
It was, by every account, a genuinely happy marriage — 45 years, until Gloria’s death from lung cancer in 1994. They had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, born in 1951, and Stewart adopted Gloria’s sons, Ronald and Michael. (Ronald was killed in action in Vietnam in 1969, a loss that devastated the family.) Friends described the Stewarts’ home as warm, unpretentious, and full of laughter — dinner parties where Stewart would do magic tricks for the children and recite poetry. He was, those who knew him insisted, exactly as nice as he seemed on screen. In Hollywood, that may be the most remarkable thing about him.
The Poet
Few people know that James Stewart wrote poetry — real poetry, published and performed. He had written verses privately for years, mostly humorous, homespun pieces in the tradition of Robert Service. In 1989, at age 81, he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and read a poem he had written about his beloved golden retriever, Beau, who had died. “I’ll never forget the way you looked at me,” he read, his voice breaking, tears streaming down his face — and Carson, the unflappable host, wept too. The clip became one of the most beloved moments in television history, and it revealed what those close to Stewart always knew: the feelings were always right there, just beneath the surface, and he was never ashamed of them.
The Last Years
Stewart worked steadily into his seventies — The Shootist (1976) with John Wayne was his final theatrical film, and he did television (The Jimmy Stewart Show) and voice work (the voice of Wylie Burp in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, 1991). He received an honorary Academy Award in 1985 for “fifty years of memorable performances,” and the audience’s standing ovation lasted minutes. In 1989, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Gloria’s death in 1994 broke him. Friends said he never recovered; he withdrew from public life, his health declined, and he spoke openly about wanting to join her. He died on July 2, 1997, at his Beverly Hills home, at the age of 89 — reportedly holding a photograph of Gloria. He was buried with full military honors. At his funeral, the Air Force flew a missing-man formation overhead — a final salute to Brigadier General James Maitland Stewart, United States Air Force Reserve.
The Quiet Hero
Hollywood has produced greater actors, perhaps, and certainly louder legends. But no star ever embodied decency as convincingly as James Stewart — because it wasn’t a performance. The bomber pilot who wept for his dog on national television, the general who knew every electrician’s name, the husband of 45 years who died holding his wife’s photograph: that was the man. George Bailey asked whether one ordinary life could be wonderful. James Stewart spent 89 years answering yes — not in a film, but in the way he lived.