James Maitland Stewart

Actor, Military Officer

JIMMY STEWART May 20th

PRE-WORLD WAR II ACTOR

WORLD WAR II COLONEL U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES

POST WAR SERVED IN U.S. AIR FORCE RESERVE ATTAINING THE RANK OF BRIGADIER GENERAL

ACTOR IN MOVIES & TV

James Maitland Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American actor and military officer who is among the most honored and popular stars in film history.

With a career that spanned 62 years, Stewart was a major Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player who was known for his distinctive drawl and down-to-earth persona, which helped him often portray American middle-class men struggling in crisis. Many of the films in which he starred have become enduring classics.

Stewart was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one for The Philadelphia Story (1940), and received an Academy Lifetime Achievement award in 1985. In 1999, Stewart was named the third-greatest male screen legend of the Golden Age of Hollywood by the American Film Institute, behind Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant. The American Film Institute has also named five of Stewart's films to its list of the 100 best American films ever mad.

He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran and pilot, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve, becoming the highest-ranking actor in military history. In 1985, Stewart was promoted to Major General, on the U.S. Air Force Reserve Retired List by President Ronald Reagan, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

WORLD WAR II

He became the first major American movie star to wear a military uniform in World War II, having been enlisted prior to the USA entering the conflict.

In August 1943, Stewart was assigned to the 445th Bomb Group as operations officer of the 703d Bombardment Squadron, but after three weeks became its commander. On October 12, 1943, judged ready to go overseas, the 445th Bomb Group staged to Lincoln Army Airfield, Nebraska. Flying individually, the aircraft first flew to Morrison Army Airfield, Florida, and then on the circuitous Southern Route along the coasts of South America and Africa to RAF Tibenham, Norfolk, England. After several weeks of training missions, in which Stewart flew with most of his combat crews, the group flew its first combat mission on December 13, 1943, to bomb the U-boat facilities at Kiel, Germany, followed three days later by a mission to Bremen. Stewart led the high squadron of the group formation on the first mission, and the entire group on the second. Following a mission to Ludwigshafen, Germany, on January 7, 1944, Stewart was promoted to major. Stewart was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions as deputy commander of the 2nd Combat Bombardment Wing on the first day of "Big Week" operations in February, and flew two other missions that week.

On March 22, 1944, Stewart flew his 12th combat mission, leading the 2nd Bomb Wing in an attack on Berlin. On March 30, 1944, he was sent to RAF Old Buckenham to become group operations officer of the 453rd Bombardment Group, a new B-24 unit that had just lost both its commander and operations officer on missions. To inspire the unit, Stewart flew as command pilot in the lead B-24 on several missions deep into Nazi-occupied Europe. His official tally of mission credits while assigned to the 445th and 453rd Bomb Groups was 20 sorties.

He received a second Distinguished Flying Cross for actions in combat and was awarded the French Croix de Guerre. He also earned the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. Stewart was one of the few Americans to ever rise from private to colonel in only four years during the Second World War.

Stewart continued to play a role in the Army Air Forces Reserve following World War II and the new United States Air Force Reserve after the official establishment of the Air Force as an independent service in 1947.

Stewart received permanent promotion to colonel in 1953 and served as Air Force Reserve commander of Dobbins Air Force Base, Georgia, the present day Dobbins Air Reserve Base. He was also one of the 12 founders and a charter member of the Air Force Association in October 1945.

On July 23, 1959, Stewart was promoted to brigadier general. During his active duty periods, he remained current as a pilot of Convair B-36 Peacemaker, Boeing B-47 Stratojet and Boeing B-52 Stratofortress intercontinental bombers of the Strategic Air Command.[59] On February 20, 1966, Brigadier General Stewart flew as a non-duty observer in a B-52 on an Arc Light bombing mission during the Vietnam War. He refused the release of any publicity regarding his participation, as he did not want it treated as a stunt, but as part of his job as an officer in the Air Force Reserve.

After 27 years of service, Stewart officially retired from the Air Force on May 31, 1968. Stewart received a number of awards during his military service and upon his retirement was also awarded the United States Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. On May 23, 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded Stewart the Presidential Medal of Freedom and promoted him to Major General on the U.S. Force Reserve Retired List.

POST WAR CAREER

For his first film in five years, Stewart appeared in his third and final Frank Capra production, It's a Wonderful Life (1946). The role was Stewart's first since returning from service in World War II, during which he experienced what is now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. Capra paid RKO for the rights to the story and formed his own production company, Liberty Films. Driven to suicide on Christmas Eve, he is led to reassess his life by Clarence Odbody, an "angel, second class" played by Henry Travers.

Although It's a Wonderful Life was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Stewart's third Best Actor nomination, it received mixed reviews and only disappointingly moderate success at the box office. However, in the decades since the film's release, it grew to define Stewart's film persona and is widely considered as a sentimental Christmas film classic and, according to the American Film Institute, one of the 100 best American movies ever made. In an interview with Michael Parkinson in 1973, Stewart declared that out of all the movies he had made, It's a Wonderful Life was his favorite.

He returned to the stage to star in Mary Coyle Chase's Harvey, which had opened to nearly universal praise in November 1944, as Elwood P. Dowd, a wealthy eccentric living with his sister and niece, and whose best friend is an invisible rabbit as large as a man. Dowd's eccentricity, especially the friendship with the rabbit, is ruining the niece's hopes of finding a husband. While trying to have Dowd committed to a sanatorium, his sister is committed herself while the play follows Dowd on an ordinary day in his not-so-ordinary life. Stewart took over the role from Frank Fay and gained an increased Broadway following in the unconventional play. The play, which ran for nearly three years with Stewart as its star, was successfully adapted into a 1950 film, directed by Henry Koster, with Stewart reprising his role and Josephine Hull portraying his sister.

After Harvey, the World War II film Malaya (1949) with Spencer Tracy, and the conventional but highly successful biographical film The Stratton Story in 1949, Stewart's first pairing with "on-screen wife" June Allyson, his career took another turn. During the 1950s, he expanded into the Western and suspense genres, thanks to collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann.

Other performances by Stewart during this time include the critically acclaimed 1950 Delmer Daves Western Broken Arrow, which featured Stewart as an ex-soldier and Indian agent making peace with the Apache; a troubled clown in the 1952 Best Picture The Greatest Show on Earth; and Stewart's role as Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's 1957 The Spirit of St. Louis. He also starred in the Western radio show The Six Shooter for its one-season run from 1953 to 1954. During this time, Stewart wore the same cowboy hat and rode the same horse, "Pie", in most of his Westerns.

Cary Grant said of Stewart's acting technique:

He had the ability to talk naturally. He knew that in conversations people do often interrupt one another and it's not always so easy to get a thought out. It took a little time for the sound men to get used to him, but he had an enormous impact. And then, some years later, Marlon came out and did the same thing all over again—but what people forget is that Jimmy did it first.

After starring in Hitchcock's remake of the director's earlier production, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), with Doris Day, Stewart starred, with Kim Novak, in what many consider Hitchcock's most personal film, Vertigo (1958).The movie starred Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who develops an obsession with a woman he is shadowing. In 2012 Vertigo was ranked highest in the Sight & Sound critics poll for the greatest films ever made, controversially taking the title from long-standing favorite Citizen Kane.

Career in the 1960s and 1970s

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

In 1960, Stewart was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and received his fifth and final Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, for his role in the 1959 Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder. This courtroom drama stars Stewart as Paul Biegler, the lawyer of a hot-tempered soldier (played by Ben Gazzara) who claims temporary insanity after murdering a tavern owner who raped his wife.

In the early 1960s, Stewart took leading roles in three John Ford films, his first work with the director. The first, Two Rode Together, paired him with Richard Widmark in a Western with thematic echoes of Ford's The Searchers. The next, 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stewart's first picture with John Wayne, is a classic "psychological" western, shot in black and white film noir style featuring powerful use of shadows in the climactic sequence, with Stewart as an Eastern attorney who goes against his non-violent principles when he is forced to confront a psychopathic outlaw (played by Lee Marvin) in a small frontier town.

As an aviator, Stewart was particularly interested in aviation films and had pushed to appear in several in the 1950s, including No Highway in the Sky (1951), and Strategic Air Command (1955) and The Spirit of St. Louis (1957).

Stewart returned to films after an absence of five years with a major supporting role in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976) where Stewart played a doctor giving Wayne's gunfighter a terminal cancer diagnosis.

DEATH

Stewart was hospitalized after falling in December 1995. In December 1996, he was due to have the battery in his pacemaker changed, but opted not to, preferring to let things happen naturally. In February 1997, he was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat. On June 25, a thrombosis formed in his right leg, leading to a pulmonary embolism one week later. Surrounded by his children on July 2, 1997, Stewart died at the age of 89 at his home in Beverly Hills, California, with his final words to his family being, "I'm going to be with Gloria now."

Over 3,000 mourners, mostly celebrities, attended Stewart's memorial service, which included full military honors.

Stewart's body was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.