Actor. Born James Maitland Stewart, on May 20, 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the first of three children to Elizabeth and Alexander Stewart. Alexander, a graduate of Princeton University, ran the prosperous family hardware shop that was founded in 1853. Stewart attended boarding school at the Mercersburg Academy where he was a member of the glee club, the school’s football team, and the dramatics club.
Like his father, Stewart attended Princeton University from 1928 to 1932. He studied architecture while at Princeton, but a classmate coaxed him into joining a fledgling theater group, the University Players. It was in this group that he befriended fellow thespian Henry Fonda. Following graduation, Stewart began acting in Broadway productions. Even though he never had a formal acting lesson, he had already achieved a moderate degree of success when, in 1935, he was offered a contract with MGM Studios. Moving to Hollywood where he roomed with Fonda, by 1936 Stewart had appeared in a slew of pictures, including The Murder Man (1935), Rose Marie (1936), Wife vs. Secretary, Small Town Girl, and After the Thin Man. Stewart was a lanky 6 feet, 3 inches tall, whose good looks suggested more the gentleman next door than that of a silver screen heartthrob. With his boyish charm and soft-spoken unaffectedness, Stewart often seemed to be playing himself—that is, an everyday man—in many of his roles, a trait that endeared him to audiences and critics alike.

He starred in Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and he received his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his role in Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). In 1940, he filmed George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, costarring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Stewart’s comical yet touching performance as a newspaperman caught in a love triangle earned him his first Academy Award. He promptly mailed the Oscar to his family to be displayed in the window of his father’s hardware shop, where the statuette remained for over 25 years. Meanwhile, World War II raged in Europe, and following his success with The Philadelphia Story, Stewart made history by joining the United States Army—the first Hollywood star to do so. However, he was initially rejected after failing his physical exam (he was 10 pounds underweight). He barely managed to pass the second physical, but, in 1941, prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was assigned to the U.S. Army Air Corps.