James Stewart, the actor who let the everyman come apart

The drawl is the alibi. Generations have shorthanded James Stewart as the decent, halting, slightly bashful American — the figure who stood on a Senate floor and refused to sit down. The shorthand obscures the rest of his work, which is mostly about that same man coming apart. The senator who will not be silenced is also the husband who screams at his children before reaching for the bridge in It’s a Wonderful Life. He is the photographer who cannot look away from his neighbor’s window. He is the retired detective climbing a bell tower after a dead woman. Stewart spent four decades quietly proving that the decent man was a structural condition, not a temperament, and that the same posture could be filled by rage, guilt, vertigo, or obsession with no change of register and no warning.

He was raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of a hardware-store owner whose business carried his Oscar on a shelf above the bins. Princeton came next, architecture, and a stint with Joshua Logan’s University Players summer-stock company on Cape Cod, where Henry Fonda became a lifelong friend. MGM signed him in 1935 on the recommendation of an aging Hedda Hopper, and for three years he was a supporting player with the wrong voice for the era’s heroic styles — too thin, too hesitant, too obviously thinking.

The actor who emerged from Frank Capra’s hands was not a movie star adjusted for the format. He was a new format. You Can’t Take It with You, in 1938, proved that the hesitation could carry a leading role; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a year later, turned it into a national myth and a first Academy Award nomination. The Philadelphia Story won him the Oscar in 1940, for the wrong film — Stewart said for the rest of his life that he had voted for Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath. He banked the statuette in his father’s shop and a few months later, weeks after the ceremony, became the first major Hollywood star to enlist in the United States Army. He flew twenty combat missions over Germany as a B-24 Liberator command pilot with the 445th Bomb Group. The war did not produce a press release at the end. He came back, did not speak about what he had seen, and re-entered the soundstages a thinner man with no obvious anger and a slightly different timing.

The first postwar film was It’s a Wonderful Life, in 1946, which lost money for RKO and was politely dismissed by The New York Times. The copyright lapse in the 1970s and free PBS broadcasts turned it into the Christmas film the studios had failed to sell — a reappraisal that almost obscures what is actually in the picture. The George Bailey of the third act, slamming a Christmas wreath off a banister and asking his daughter why she practices the same scale over and over, was the first sustained portrait of a Stewart character genuinely unmoored. The film’s late canonization has tended to file that scene under ‘the dark middle before the heartwarming end.’ It is closer to the rest of his postwar work than to the carol that surrounds it.

The Anthony Mann cycle — Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country, The Man from Laramie, all in five years — is the body of work Stewart’s everyman reputation tends to skip over. Mann put him on horseback chasing men who had wronged him, and gave him an obsessive, almost ugly grief. The Hitchcock films completed the argument. Rear Window is about not looking away. The Man Who Knew Too Much, in its 1956 remake, is about a doctor pulling apart in real time while pretending to keep order. And Vertigo, the late critical canon’s choice for the greatest film ever made, is a Stewart performance organized entirely around the failure of will. The Mann cycle and the Hitchcock cycle are usually praised separately, as if the actor had a Western mode and a thriller mode. They are the same project: the decent middle-American man tipping, slowly, into the thing the public version had reassured everyone he could not become.

Anatomy of a Murder, in 1959, gave him a courtroom and a different kind of fall — a small-town lawyer fluent enough in jazz and amorality to defend a man both he and the audience suspect. The 1960s pulled him toward elegiac Westerns, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance among them, where he sat across from John Wayne and let the screen agree that the legend and the man were no longer in the same room. He semi-retired in the seventies, took occasional voice work into the nineties — his last credit a wolf in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West — and accepted the long sequence of lifetime honors, the AFI award, Kennedy Center, an Honorary Oscar, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gloria, his wife of forty-five years, died of lung cancer in 1994. He did not appear in public often after. He died at his Beverly Hills home on July 2, 1997, of cardiac arrest following a pulmonary embolism.

Fathom Entertainment is bringing It’s a Wonderful Life back to American theaters in December 2026 for its eightieth anniversary, and a new biographical film, Jimmy, directed by Aaron Burns and starring KJ Apa as Stewart, opens in November of that year. Both are likely to reinforce the version of Stewart that he himself complicated for fifty years — the version that ends in the snowy bridge scene rather than the one that begins in the Mann westerns and ends in the bell tower. The body of work is more interesting than the legend, and the legend has had a head start.