James Maitland Stewart was born on 20 May 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a hardware store. He was educated at a local prep school, Mercersburg Academy, where he was a keen athlete (football and track), musician (singing and accordion playing), and sometime actor. In 1929 he won a place at Princeton, where he studied architecture with some success and became further involved with the performing arts as a musician and actor with the University Players.

After graduation, engagements with the University Players took him around the northeastern United States, including a run on Broadway in 1932. But work dried up as the Great Depression deepened, and it wasn't until 1934, when he followed his friend Henry Fonda to Hollywood, that things began to pick up.

After his first screen appearance in Art Trouble (1934), he worked for a time for MGM as a contract player and slowly began making a name for himself in increasingly high-profile roles throughout the rest of the 1930s. His famous collaborations with Frank Capra, in Vous ne l'emporterez pas avec vous (1938), Mr. Smith au sénat (1939), and, after World War II, La vie est belle (1946) helped to launch his career as a star and to establish his screen persona as the likable everyman.

Having learned to fly in 1935, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1940 as a private (after twice failing the medical for being underweight). During the course of World War II he rose to the rank of colonel, first as an instructor at home in the United States, and later on combat missions in Europe. He remained involved with the U.S. Air Force Reserve after the war and retired in 1959 as a brigadier general.

Stewart's acting career took off properly after the war. During the course of his long professional life he had roles in some of Hollywood's best remembered films, starring in a string of Westerns (bringing his "everyman" qualities to movies like L'homme qui tua Liberty Valance (1962)), biopics (Un homme change son destin (1949), Romance inachevée (1954), and L'odyssée de Charles Lindbergh (1957), for instance) thrillers (most notably his frequent collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock) and even some screwball comedies .

He continued to work into the 1990s and died at the age of 89 in 1997.