page_title: James Stewart
section_title: Television and semi-retirement (1971–1991)
hierarchical_section_title: James Stewart / Career / Television and semi-retirement (1971–1991)
caption_attribution_description: English: Publicity photo of James Stewart from the television program Hawkins.
context_page_description: James Maitland Stewart was an American actor and military officer. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart had a film career that spanned over 55 years from 1935 and 1991 and 80 films. With the strong morality he portrayed both on and off the screen, Stewart epitomized the "American ideal" in twentieth-century United States. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him third on its list of the greatest American male actors.
  Born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Stewart started acting while studying at Princeton University. After graduating in 1932, he began a career as a stage actor, appearing on Broadway and in summer stock productions. In 1935, he signed a film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The studio did not see leading man material in Stewart, but after three years of supporting roles and being loaned out to other studios, he had his big breakthrough in Frank Capra's ensemble comedy You Can't Take It with You. The following year, Stewart garnered his first of five Academy Award nominations for his portrayal of an idealized and virtuous man who becomes a senator in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
context_section_description: In 1971, Stewart starred in the NBC sitcom The Jimmy Stewart Show. He played a small-town college professor, whose adult son moves back home with his family. Stewart disliked the amount of work needed to film the show each week, and was relieved when it was canceled after only one season due to bad reviews and lack of audiences. His only film release for 1971, the comedy-drama Western Fools' Parade, was more positively received. Robert Greenspun of The New York Times stated that "the movie belongs to Stewart, who has never been more wonderful." For his contributions to Western films, Stewart was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City in 1972.
  Stewart returned to television in Harvey for NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame series in 1972, and then starred in the CBS mystery series Hawkins in 1973. Playing a small-town lawyer investigating mysterious cases – similar to his character in Anatomy of a Murder – Stewart won a Golden Globe for his performance. Nevertheless, Hawkins failed to gain a wide audience, possibly because it rotated with Shaft, which had a starkly conflicting demographic, and was canceled after one season. Stewart also periodically appeared on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, sharing poems he had written at different times in his life. His poems were later compiled into a short collection, Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989).
  After performing again in Harvey at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in 1975, Stewart returned to films with a major supporting role in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976), playing a doctor giving Wayne's gunfighter a terminal cancer diagnosis. By this time, Stewart had a hearing impairment, which affected his ability to hear his cues and led to him repeatedly flubbing his lines; his vanity would not allow him to admit this or to wear a hearing aid. Stewart was offered the role of Howard Beale in Network (1976), but refused it due to its explicit language. Instead, he appeared in supporting roles in the disaster film Airport '77 (1977), the remake The Big Sleep (1978), and the family film The Magic of Lassie (1978). Despite mixed reviews, Airport '77 was a box-office success, but the two other films were commercial and critical failures. Harry Haun of New York Daily News wrote in his review of The Big Sleep that it was "really sad to see James Stewart struggle so earnestly with material that just isn't there." Stewart's final live-action feature film was the critically panned Japanese film The Green Horizon (1980), directed by Susumu Hani. Stewart took the role because the film promoted wildlife conservation and allowed his family to travel with him to Kenya.
  In the 1980s, Stewart semi-retired from acting. He was offered the role of Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981), but turned it down because he disliked the film's father-daughter relationship; the role went instead to his friend, Henry Fonda. Stewart filmed two television movies in the 1980s: Mr. Krueger's Christmas (1980), produced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream to conduct the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Right of Way (1983), an HBO drama that co-starred Bette Davis. He also made an appearance in the historical miniseries North and South in 1986, and did voiceover work for commercials for Campbell's Soups in the 1980s and 1990s. Stewart's last film performance was voicing the character of Sheriff Wylie Burp in the animation movie An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991).
  Stewart remained in the public eye due to his frequent visits to the White House during the Reagan administration. The re-release of Hitchcock films gained him renewed recognition, with Rear Window and Vertigo in particular praised by film critics. Stewart also received several honorary film industry awards at the end of his career: an American Film Institute Award in 1980, a Silver Bear in 1982, Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, an Academy Honorary Award in 1985, and National Board of Review and Film Society of
caption: Stewart in a publicity still for the mystery series Hawkins (1973), which ran for one season.
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