Jimmy Stewart’s daughter says worsening hearing helped persuade the screen legend to stop accepting acting roles. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in an interview published November 7, Kelly Stewart-Harcourt recalled that her father was also slowing down with age.
Although Stewart used hearing aids, his daughter described the 1980s models as “these giant plastic things” that he could not wear on set. She said he also disliked the idea of receiving special attention so he could hear what was being said around him.
His final live-action feature film was the Japanese production A Tale of Africa in 1980. He continued working in television, making his last TV acting appearance in the 1986 miniseries North and South, Book II.
He later voiced Wylie Burp, an aging sheriff dog, in the 1991 animated Western An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. It became his final credited acting role.
He Admired The Graduate and Dustin Hoffman
Stewart-Harcourt also remembered her father’s reaction to Mike Nichols’ 1967 film The Graduate. He thought the movie was “fantastic,” she said, and regarded Dustin Hoffman as “one of the great new young actors.”
Stewart’s own credits included the idealistic senator Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the photographer confined to his apartment in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. He won the Best Actor Oscar for The Philadelphia Story.
His later honors included the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1980 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983.
His Daughter Helped Bring His Wartime Story to the Screen
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Jimmy, directed by Aaron Burns and starring KJ Apa as Stewart, opened in U.S. theaters November 6. Stewart-Harcourt served as an executive producer on the film.
Stewart joined the Army Air Corps in 1941, flew 20 combat missions over Europe and reached the rank of colonel by the end of World War II. After returning home, he worked with Frank Capra on It’s a Wonderful Life.
In a November 2 interview with AARP, Stewart-Harcourt said her father wanted to keep his military service separate from Hollywood. After his death, her twin sister, Judy, found a wartime diary in a bedside drawer. The family had not known it existed, and its account of his fears and struggles helped shape the film.
For Stewart-Harcourt, casting her father meant avoiding “a Jimmy Stewart impersonation for two hours.” She told EW she was thrilled with Apa’s portrayal.
According to Fathom Entertainment, Apa joined Stewart-Harcourt and Burns at a May birthday celebration in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The Jimmy Stewart Museum unveiled The Making of JIMMY, an exhibition of costumes, props and photographs from the production.