Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and some other dapper gentleman (John Howard?) recording The Philadelphia Story for radio (via)

Grace Kelly & Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (1954, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (via)

“Everything about Grace was appealing. I was married, but I wasn’t dead. She had those big warm eyes and, well, if you had ever played a love scene with her, you’d know she wasn’t cold. She had an inner confidence. People who have that are not cold. Grace had that twinkle and a touch of larceny in her eye.”

-Jimmy Stewart

Jimmy Stewart (1934, via reelclassics)

“I suppose people can relate to being me, while they dream about being John Wayne.”

Vertigo, in spirals (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Jimmy Stewart with his two stepsons (California 1951, photo by Gene Lester) 

“I’m beginning to believe that, in films, what everyone is striving for is to produce moments—not a performance, not a characterization, not something where you get into the part—you produce moments that create a feeling of believability to what you’re doing….

I was making a Western in British Columbia and we were on the Columbia Icefields. It was raining and there was heavy mist around, so we couldn’t shoot, so we were all huddled around a fire. Suddenly, out of the mist, came a man, and he was not a young man. He had a beard—it wasn’t exactly a beard, he just hadn’t shaved for a while—and he was a miner type, he was dressed like a miner. He came closer to us and he said, ‘Which one of you is Stewart?’

‘I am.’

He came over and looked at me and said, ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. I recognize ya. Well, I heard you was here, and I thought I’d come up and say hello. I’ve seen a lot of your picture shows, but I think the one I liked best—you were in this room and your girlfriend was in the next room and there were fireflies outside, and you recited a piece of poetry to her. I thought that was a nice thing for you to do.’

And I remembered exactly the moment, exactly the film, who was in it, who directed it, and I also realized that that picture had been released twenty years before. That man made a tremendous impression on me. To think that I had been part of creating a moment that this man had liked and had remembered for twenty years. I’ll never forget it. That’s what I mean by the moment.”

-Stewart, in a 1972 British Film Institute interview (via)

James Stewart in Vertigo (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) (via)

Katharine Hepburn & Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940, dir. George Cukor) (via drmacro)

“I loved working with Katharine. She was fun…but she was very serious about the film. She was almost the producer, and when I had to do a scene in a bathing suit…well, I just told Katharine that I looked ridiculous in a bathing suit because my legs were just so thin. She said, ‘Show me your legs,’ and she said it with such authority that I hoisted my pants up until she could see my knees. And she took one look and said, ‘You’re right. Those are just the worst legs I’ve ever seen!’ And so she talked [The Philadelphia Story director George] Cukor into letting me do the scene in a bathrobe”.

-Stewart on Hepburn, his gams, and filming The Philadelphia Story (quoted in Michael Munn’s Jimmy Stewart)

Cary Grant receiving an Academy Honorary Award in 1970 (online here)

“Years ago, when Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon were getting divorced, a perhaps apocryphal story appeared in the scandal sheets: As an example of Grant’s supposed irrationality, Cannon cited to the judge Cary’s yearly habit of sitting in front of his television and sardonically abusing all the participants. This item, true or not, must have amused nearly everyone in Hollywood, since nearly everyone in Hollywood does pretty much the same thing. 

The funny thing is that from all accounts, when the Academy Awards began in 1939, they were conducted in a similar spirit of irreverence, something that has practically disappeared from the event itself. “They used to have it down at the old Coconut Grove,” Jimmy Stewart told me in the late 70s. “You’d have dinner and alawta drinks - the whole thing was…it was just…it was a party. Nobody took it all that seriously. I mean, it was swell if ya won because your friends were givin’ it to you, but it didn’t mean anything at the bawx office or anything. It was just alawta friends gettin’ together and tellin’ some jokes and gettin’ loaded and givin’ out some little prizes. My gawsh, it was..there was no pressure or anything like that.”

Cary Grant corroborated this to me: ”It was a private affair, you see - no television, no radio, even - just a group of friends giving each other a party. Because, you know, there is something a little embarrassing about all these wealthy people publicly congratulating each other. When it began, we kidded ourselves: ‘All right, Freddie March,’ we’d say, ‘we know you’re making a million dollars - now come up and get your little medal for it!’”

-excerpted from Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Hell’s In It

Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo’s nightmare sequence (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)