Kelly Stewart remembers her dad, Jimmy Stewart
If you don’t think Jimmy Stewart put the classic in classic movies, consider these titles in which he starred: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Rear Window,” “Vertigo,” “Harvey,” and the list goes on.
No wonder Stewart appears near the top of just about every list of all-time most popular classic film actors.
With such a resume, it’s hard to imagine the man didn’t develop an ego the size of the famous Hollywood sign on Mount Lee in the Santa Monica Mountains. But according to his daughter Kelly, the respectable, unpretentious, all-American guy he often portrayed on film was also the real Jimmy Stewart.
Married to his beloved Gloria for 45 years, the Stewarts had two sons (one killed in Vietnam) and twin daughters. Like her siblings, Kelly never took up acting — she became an anthropologist.
“The life of an actor didn’t really look like that much fun to me,” she said. “We went to Dad’s set a couple of times (and) it looked very tedious to me — short takes, just a few minutes long, after which people come rushing up to you, touching up makeup and hair, hovering and fussing and
looking. I remember thinking, I could never do this.”
Growing up, Kelly recalls her father preparing for roles at home.
“Dad sat in a big comfy armchair that had a matching footrest and no one else ever sat in that chair when (he) was home! When he was working on a movie, he would sit with the script in his hands and his lips moving saying
his lines to himself. He never said anything out loud. I have that image of him burned into my mind. We never read any of the lines with him. Except for that, he rarely brought his work home with him.”
This interview for Father’s Day was condensed and edited from the author’s book “Raised by the Stars: Interviews with 29 Children of Hollywood Actors.”