Why James Stewart was banned from playing his own dead body onscreen: “I wanted to do more”
Death scenes can often be tricky things for an actor to navigate, but playing a dead body is about as easy as it gets. All they have to do is lie there and not move a muscle. And yet, James Stewart was barred from serving as his own cadaver onscreen.
Like many of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s most famous leading men, cinema’s ultimate everyman didn’t die very often. In a full-time film career that spanned almost half a century and saw him appear in almost 100 pictures, Stewart only popped his clogs in around half a dozen pictures, and none after 1968.
It wasn’t that he was necessarily against the idea of being shuffled off his mortal coil in front of the cameras; it’s that he knew, as did his directors and producers, that audiences didn’t want to see it. Much like John Wayne, who had a famous aversion toward not making it to the end credits, the Academy Award winner was the type of guy viewers hated seeing killed.
However, in what was the first time one of his characters had their clogs popped since he played the title role in 1953’s The Glen Miller Story, Stewart’s Linus Rawlings was fated to meet his end in How the West Was Won. The 1962 epic featured a murderer’s row of big-name stars and high-profile filmmakers, with John Ford putting his foot down and declaring that the It’s a Wonderful Life icon wasn’t needed.
Stewart headlined the Ford-helmed segment ‘The Rivers’ as a mountain-dwelling explorer who lends an assist to the Prescott family when they run into trouble in the wilderness. It’s revealed that Linus ultimately dies during the Battle of Shiloh, and his body is glimpsed when it’s carried into a hospital tent and he’s declared dead.
All it required was for Stewart to lie on a gurney and be carried into the shot, but he wasn’t allowed. Why? According to co-star George Peppard, it’s because Ford was being difficult. “Jimmy told Ford that it wasn’t going to cost the studio any more to do the single shot because we were all on flat fees,” he told Michael Munn. “An audience quickly forgets the name of a character, especially in a film like that with so many characters.”
Stewart argued, and reasonably so, that it “would have made all the emotional difference” to the viewers were they to see the superstar lying dead, which Ford didn’t allow. Why? Peppard thinks it’s because the curmudgeonly cyclops “didn’t like anyone coming up with good ideas.”
An actor playing their own corpse isn’t a good idea, even if it is a sensible one. “I wanted to do more,” Stewart reasoned of his performance. “I said, ‘Let me play the body of my own character.’ But Ford was just so grumpy and said that a double, who looked nothing like me, could do the part.”
How the West Was Won roped in Stewart, Ford, Peppard, Henry Hathaway, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Eli Wallach, and countless other figures who’d become synonymous with the western, but the former was flat-out rejected when he asked to go prone and play his own dead body for the sake of a single shot.
