The only time Tom Hanks met James Stewart: “Would you forget a story like that?”
He eventually grew out of it, but Tom Hanks used to get really pissed off when people would constantly compare him to James Stewart, even if the similarities were there for everyone to see.
The ‘Golden Age’ icon was American cinema’s favourite everyman, and an actor who always played characters with an upstanding moral code. Hanks didn’t always do that, as evidenced by some of the bawdy comedies he made in the 1980s, but once he settled into his groove, the comparisons intensified.
Since he was a charming, amiable, and altogether friendly guy who nobody in Hollywood had a bad word to say about, coupled with the fact that some of his best and most successful movies saw him playing characters without a bad bone in their body, the Stewart 2.0 label stuck, and it’s never been ripped off.
He was literally compared to the It’s a Wonderful Life and Rear Window star by the president of the United States when Barack Obama celebrated his accomplishments at the 2014 Kennedy Centre Honours, by which time the two-time Academy Award winner had long since made his peace with the fact that his Stewart-shaped bed had been made for him, and he had no other choice but to lie in it.
In 1987, though, he had a different opinion. “It’s Jimmy Stewart this, Jimmy Stewart that,” he said. “It’s as big a compliment as you can get, but it’s not anywhere near accurate.” Even his close friend and frequent collaborator, Steven Spielberg, disagreed, revealing that if he had made Saving Private Ryan in 1951, he “would’ve wanted Jimmy Stewart to play the part” of John Miller.
It was all water under the bridge by the end of the ’80s, when they came face to face for the first time for Life magazine, which ran a special issue that paired actors of different eras together. William Hurt and Olivia de Havilland, and Michael Keaton and Mickey Rooney, didn’t make much sense, but Meryl Streep and Bette Davis did, although no twosome was as fitting or apt as Hanks and Stewart.
Reflecting on the moment, ‘America’s Dad’ was most taken by the complete lack of evidence that Stewart had been one of his generation’s biggest and most popular names. “He had absolutely no memorabilia from his career,” Hanks revealed. “None. Zero. He had nothing. No sign of a movie that he had made.”
The closest thing he had to a memento from a filmography that featured an Oscar-winning performance and a cavalcade of classics was “one little tiny figurine of Harvey the rabbit on a bookshelf,” and “that was it, in a huge house.” However, he did have one memento, a watercolour painting of his beloved movie horse, Pie, which was commissioned by Stewart’s best friend, Henry Fonda.
The legend told Hanks that his equine companion had died two weeks after he hung the painting on the wall, which he’s never forgotten: “Would you forget a story like that?” When you’ve been invited into James Stewart’s home and he tells you the reason why he’s got a huge artwork of a horse taking pride of place in his home, no, you wouldn’t forget a story like that.
