A WONDERFUL FELLA: JAMES STEWART, 1908-1997

For the half-century of his life onscreen, James Stewart had a guilty secret, and the moviegoing public let him get away with it. Stewart presented himself as an ordinary guy--just a Jimmy. Maybe a slightly overachieving Jimmy, what with the Princeton degree and the Air Force brigadier general's stripes. But all in all a solid Republican sprung from humble merchant stock in Indiana, Pa. In a lifetime of movies, Stewart was the goodwill ambassador for a genial, vanishing America.

Stewart became the butt of a thousand impressionists for his familiar "Waaaaal," which sounded like a trombonist running out of breath and purpose. He cared little for the racking discipline of the Method; he would simply stand on his mark and stammer out his lines. He wore his renown comfortably, like a pair of overalls, and enjoyed as scandal-free a life as any top Hollywood star. "My husband," said Stewart's one and only wife Gloria, "is much too normal to be an actor." The man himself considered his job well done "if you can get through a film and not have the acting show."

Waaaaal, he could run from the charge, but he couldn't hide. And now we can say it out loud: James Stewart was a great actor.

Watch him at work in the 1946 It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's Christmas confection with the bittersweet center. Stewart, as young George Bailey, is stepping up on one of his shaky soapboxes to tell off crippled town bully Lionel Barrymore. It is the first of many righteous harangues George will deliver, and at first he doesn't realize this one will get him in serious trouble, for he is talking himself into a lifetime sentence in Bedford Falls. Stewart seemed to spend most of his career on the threshold of puberty; the anguished ripple of a high-strung teenager was heard in each syllable. But here, through his carefully eccentric alternation of strangulated pauses and staccato paragraphs, in the almost imperceptible straightening of his body language from question mark to exclamation point, we see a footloose lad turning into a responsible young man--a rite of passage in a movie minute. Ladies and gentlemen: acting!

American acting, for Stewart carried the image of America, at least as the nation once fancied itself: rural, righteous, ornery, stubborn in its idealism, never picking a fight and never backing away from one. To look at his scarecrow physique and the long, gawky strides, as if he were making his way across a pond by stepping on turtles' backs, you'd never guess Stewart was a movie star. But that's what helped make him one: his extraordinary ordinariness.

At 89, Stewart had nothing more to prove and, as he saw it, not much to live for. But when he died, he took a lot with him: the audience's considered belief that he, of all actors, was the attainable best of us. So his death last week, of a blood clot in the lung, provoked a surprisingly profound melancholy in his fans and friends. "I know he was elderly, and we had to expect it," says Doris Day, his co-star in Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much, "but I still can't believe it. And I can't stand it." Now only Katharine Hepburn, Stewart's blithe siren in The Philadelphia Story, is left to exemplify the glamour and idealism of Hollywood in its golden '30s.