How the “dream” role of James Stewart’s career turned into a nightmare: “Just a disaster”
Actors who become so intrinsically linked to a persona find it harder than most to disappear into a character, and onscreen personalities have rarely come more distinct than James Stewart.
There’s no doubt he was a talented actor, but he wasn’t exactly Marlon Brando. Like many other ‘Golden Age’ stalwarts, he embraced the archetypes and built one of Hollywood’s most legendary careers on the aw-shucks sentimentality and everyman essence that nobody has bettered since.
It didn’t prevent him from winning an Academy Award, starring in a string of classic films, and working with the biggest directors and brightest stars of his era, with scripts being written for a James Stewart-type being sent straight to James Stewart’s desk, which made it harder for him to find a passion project.
When he caught wind of a biopic centred on his childhood hero, he lobbied hard to be cast. One obvious downside was that he was more than two decades older than the subject, but he didn’t care. After several false starts and Stewart’s repeated insistence, he was eventually hired to play Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St Louis.
The famed aviator secured his place in history when he piloted the titular plane for the first transatlantic flight in history, nonstop from New York to Paris in May 2027. Lindbergh was 25 when he did it, and Stewart was 47 when the cameras started rolling, and no amount of makeup could obscure that fact.
“I was smart enough to know I was twice Lindbergh’s age,” he informed Michael Munn. “[Leland] Howard really pitched hard to get me the role. Jack Warner wouldn’t hear of it to start with, which I can understand. So Warner made Hawyward break the news to me that I didn’t have the role, which really disappointed me.”
Stewart had already made his intentions clear that he wanted to headline a Lindbergh biopic in 1947, ten years before The Spirit of St Louis was released. Once John Kerr turned it down, he made his move. The actor revealed that because he “wanted the part so badly,” he went on a crash diet to slim down and dyed his hair to match the real-life figure’s blonde locks.
He got his wish and played his dream role, but the film tanked at the box office and received a muted response from critics. It was everything he’d ever wanted, up until a certain point. “It was a dream of mine to play Charles Lindbergh,” Stewart lamented. “He was my boyhood hero.”
Always one to find the positive, with the benefit of hindsight, he compared it to another one of his failures that eventually found an audience: “Happens to some movies, like It’s a Wonderful Life. Just doesn’t do so well when first released,” he mused. “But at the time, The Spirit of St Louis was just a disaster.”
Sometimes, a dream role is better off as a dream, with Stewart discovering that the realities can often be harsher than anyone could anticipate.
