Word: stewart
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Artless, yes; the poem lacked the gift of making grief palpable, as Stewart had done with such searing poignancy in Vertigo. But the feelings were just as direct, honorable, crushing. Imagine his desolation when, in 1994, Gloria died, at 75, of lung cancer. With no hand to hold, no hair to stroke, no lovely, comforting figure to share his bed, Stewart was bereft and, for all his loving children and friends, alone. He stopped his ritual of going to the office to answer his fan mail. Says Lord Richard Attenborough, who appeared with Stewart in The Flight of the Phoenix...
...past two years at home, sad to say, he came down from his bedroom only to eat lunch and dinner," Army Archerd, a close friend, wrote in his Daily Variety column, "and only on some occasions." When Archerd suggested he stop by, Stewart replied, "I don't think you'd find me very interesting these days." He had always been meticulous in presenting himself to the world; now, with Gloria gone, the masque was over. He stopped playing Jimmy Stewart. In a recent news clip, painful to see, he was bald, gaunt, liver-spotted, nearly unrecognizable. Yet he waved...
...bitter part of his passing," says Kim Novak, the object of his obsession in Vertigo, "is that there'll never be another Jimmy Stewart. He wasn't an actor; he was the real thing. But the sweet part is that he was ready to move on. The last time I spoke with him, about five weeks ago, I felt he had already left on another journey. He was in a peaceful place where he didn't want to know about earthly things. He was like a brave Indian warrior who knew it was time to move on and was facing...
Death is not a happy ending in Hollywood movies. A beloved man is dead, and we mourn, for our loss at least as much as his. But this is a cause for celebration. Today a new generation, raised on facetiousness and arid sensation, has the thrilling duty to discover Stewart's crucial contribution to the movies that made the movies great. The young may also take instruction from his exemplary life story. How simple it was--we would like to say how simply American. Jimmy Stewart lived for movies, fought for his country and died for love...
Early in this century, the humorist Stephen Leacock said the American innocent must prove his folksy virtue by being semi-inarticulate, mouthing things like "Heck, b'gosh, b'gum, yuck, yuck." That is why Jimmy Stewart's hesitating-gulpy delivery was reassuring. His appeal went so deep because it touched America's belief in its own simplicity. When Mark Twain wanted to present himself as a traveling American, he called his tourist book The Innocents Abroad...