May 12, 2008. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Actor who personified American decency, James Stewart, born 100 years ago
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, May 12, Graphic News:  He was the small-town boy who found lasting fame playing small-town men; the son of a Presbyterian shopkeeper who went on to become one of HollywoodÕs finest. Ranked alongside Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart -- as he was universally known -- is remembered, above all, as a genuinely modest man who connected with audiences because they felt he was just like them. ÒIÕm the inarticulate man who triesÓ, he once said. ÒI donÕt really have all the answers, but for some reason, somehow, I make itÓ.

With his slow drawl and hesitant manner, Stewart could play a debt-ridden husband in mental anguish or a peace-loving cowboy in the brutal Wild West, and show how the good individual can affect society. Nowhere is this more acutely portrayed than in the movies he made with director Frank Capra. Their collaboration in Mr Smith Goes To Washington (1939) and ItÕs A Wonderful Life (1946) earned Stewart two of his five Oscar nominations for Best Actor. Years later, he decried the move to add colour to the classic black and white of ItÕs A Wonderful Life, which hit its mark in the era of post-war austerity and is still watched by millions every Christmas. As George Bailey, the suicidal businessman who gets a second chance to see the value of his life, thanks to his guardian angel, Stewart could have been right back in his home community of Indiana, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where, after he won his Oscar for The Philadelphia Story (1940), his father kept the gold statuette on display in his hardware store for 25 years.

Originally planning to be an architect, Stewart got into acting while at Princeton University, where his fellow players included Henry Fonda. Their troupe took a production to Broadway where first Fonda and then Stewart were spotted by film studio scouts and followed each other to Los Angeles. Despite a lucrative contract with MGM, Stewart chose to enlist during the Second World War and became a distinguished fighter pilot, leading bombing raids over Germany and winning medals for bravery. This only added to the esteem in which American audiences, in particular, held him. Many also saw, in his darker roles afterwards -- with director Alfred Hitchcock, for example -- a man whose wartime experiences had had a sobering effect. The humour and naivety of his earlier films was replaced by suspense, and a touch of the sinister, in the likes of Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1956).

In his greatest Westerns, such as John FordÕs The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Stewart again portrayed characters called to do their duty and stand up for right. Off-screen, he was known to be devoted to his wife, Gloria, with whom he had twin daughters and whose two sons from her first marriage he adopted. After her death in 1994, Stewart largely withdrew from public life and died in California in February 1997 at the age of 89, his last words, reportedly: ÒIÕm going to be with Gloria nowÓ.
/ENDS