Lady Hollywood

inessentialhouses:

Happy 105th Birthday, Jimmy Stewart
(May 20, 1908 - July 2, 1997)

“I’ve sort of gotten into the habit of looking for the vulnerable guy, the guy who makes mistakes, the guy who can’t figure things out all the time but keeps at it.”

James Stewart

msmildred:

Humphrey Bogart visiting the set of “Rope”, 1948.

“He reveals a quality that at first seems out of sync with the shy, stammering personality favored by nightclub imitators. He is debonair. He has the same humor and lightness of touch that Fred Astaire expresses only through dance. Stewart is debonair when dousing Miss Dietrich and Una Merkel with a bucketful of water (‘Destry Rides Again’) or confined to a wheelchair with one leg in a plaster cast (‘Rear Window’). He is debonair even when wrestling with terrible guilt and a sense of loss in ‘Vertigo.’ Also like Astaire when he dances, Stewart is best seen on the screen in full figure, with all of the lean 6-foot-3 1/2-inch man captured in a single frame. He acts with his whole body. The slight stoop and the way his wrinkled jacket hangs from his shoulders are as integral to his performance in ‘Harvey’ as any of playwright Mary Chase’s lines.”
—Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 1997

“He reveals a quality that at first seems out of sync with the shy, stammering personality favored by nightclub imitators. He is debonair. He has the same humor and lightness of touch that Fred Astaire expresses only through dance. Stewart is debonair when dousing Miss Dietrich and Una Merkel with a bucketful of water (‘Destry Rides Again’) or confined to a wheelchair with one leg in a plaster cast (‘Rear Window’). He is debonair even when wrestling with terrible guilt and a sense of loss in ‘Vertigo.’ Also like Astaire when he dances, Stewart is best seen on the screen in full figure, with all of the lean 6-foot-3 1/2-inch man captured in a single frame. He acts with his whole body. The slight stoop and the way his wrinkled jacket hangs from his shoulders are as integral to his performance in ‘Harvey’ as any of playwright Mary Chase’s lines.”

—Vincent Canby, The New York Times, 1997