James Stewart’s favourite co-star: “It was so obvious that he was in love with her”
James Stewart wasn’t the most dashing of leading men, but he did get to star opposite some of the greatest female actors of his generation. He was paired with screwball comedy queens like Katharine Hepburn and Gene Arthur, as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s favoured ‘ice blondes’ Grace Kelly and Kim Novak. He looked like an everyman, but he was so unassuming and charming on-screen that you couldn’t help but root for him. Even when he was pitted against Cary Grant as a romantic rival in The Philadelphia Story, he threatened to make the happily-ever-after between Grant and Hepburn a disappointment.
Throughout his lengthy career working with Hollywood’s biggest and brightest stars, Stewart had a clear favourite, an actor who was more than just a co-star and friend, but a mentor who helped shepherd him to stardom. Without her, it’s safe to assume that Stewart’s unlikely ascent to the top of the Hollywood ladder would never have happened.
Stewart met Margaret Sullavan in the early 1930s when they were both doing summer stock theatre in Cape Cod. They hit it off instantly. Rumours about their relationship abounded over the years, but the most common version of the story is that Stewart was madly in love with her and Sullavan friend-zoned him. Either way, they remained close friends even as she was swept off to Hollywood and he was left to scrape pennies together in the theatre on the East Coast.
Sullavan launched to stardom in the early ‘30s, appearing in movies like The Good Fairy and So Red the Rose. When she was cast in the 1936 production of Next Time We Love, she made a generous and pivotal decision by campaigning hard to have Stewart cast opposite her. At the time, he was a complete unknown, but she was so sure of his potential that she threatened to go on strike if the studio didn’t cast him. When they agreed, she worked with him behind the scenes, coaching his performance to be less mannered and feature more of his innate awkward charm. The film was a hit, and it launched him into leading man status.
Stewart and Sullavan made four movies together in total, and in every one, their lighthearted chemistry shone through. She fit perfectly into the screwball comedy mould with her ability to land devastating insults with a lightness and ebullience to rival the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Jean Arthur. Two of their films, Shopworn Angel and Mortal Storm, were dramas, but their most famous pairing was Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy masterpiece, The Shop Around the Corner, in which they played rival colleagues at a leathergood shop who trade jabs while unknowingly being anonymous pen pals.
Walter Pidgeon, who starred alongside the duo in Shopworn Angel and played the third part in a love triangle with them, said that he “felt like the odd man out” during the production. “It was so obvious he was in love with her,” Pidgeon said. “He came absolutely alive in his scenes with her, playing with a conviction and a sincerity I never knew him to summon away from her.”
Sullavan’s career had the opposite trajectory to Stewart’s. Although their fame overlapped in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, her career sharply declined while his continued to rise well into the 1950s. In 1960, she died of a prescription drug overdose. Stewart’s wife, Gloria Stewart, recounted that he fell into a depression afterwards and avoided work for a time. Although it may not be directly connected, his career took a distinct turn after that. From 1960 onward, he began to explore much darker characters, often in westerns, in stark contrast to the loveably bumbling everyman that he played in the first two decades of his career.
