James Stewart Dies: Hollywood Loses Its Everyman

James Stewart flew 20 combat missions over Germany as a bomber pilot during World War II and came back unable to sleep or talk about what he had seen. Born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, he was one of the first major Hollywood stars to enlist after Pearl Harbor, joining the Army Air Corps in March 1941, nine months before the United States entered the war. He was already a movie star. He had won the Academy Award for Best Actor for "The Philadelphia Story" in 1941. The military initially tried to use him for propaganda and morale-building, but Stewart insisted on combat duty. He flew his first mission over Kiel, Germany, in late 1943 as a B-24 Liberator pilot with the 445th Bombardment Group. He eventually rose to the rank of colonel and commanded the 703rd Bombardment Squadron, leading missions over heavily defended targets in Germany. The psychological toll was severe. He suffered from what is now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, experiencing nightmares, insomnia, and a persistent hypervigilance that he managed by not discussing the war for decades. The quality that directors had tried to coax from him before the war, a sense of interior vulnerability beneath a surface of calm decency, was now genuine. The post-war films that cemented his legacy, "It's a Wonderful Life," "Vertigo," "Rear Window," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," and the Anthony Mann westerns, all drew on a darkness and emotional complexity that had not been present in his earlier work. He remained in the Air Force Reserve, eventually reaching the rank of brigadier general, the highest-ranking actor in American military history. He died on July 2, 1997, at age 89. His last words to his family, reportedly, were: "I'm going to be with Gloria now." His wife had died ten months earlier.