James Stewart Trivia
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49 free James Stewart trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
James Stewart trivia for classic-film fans, Christmas-movie devotees and anyone who can do the drawl. This quiz follows Jimmy Stewart from the family hardware store in Indiana, Pennsylvania, through Princeton and summer stock with Henry Fonda, to the Frank Capra films that made him a star, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life, and the Oscar he won for The Philadelphia Story. It covers the four Hitchcock collaborations, Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo, the Anthony Mann Westerns that reinvented his career and the profit-sharing deal that changed Hollywood, plus Harvey, Anatomy of a Murder, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and his final role voicing a cartoon sheriff. There is also his remarkable second life: rejected as underweight, he flew B-24 combat missions over Germany and retired from the Air Force Reserve as a brigadier general. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you enjoy this quiz, try our Alfred Hitchcock, classic Hollywood and It's a Wonderful Life quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Pennsylvania town was James Stewart born in 1908?
Indiana
Indiana, Pennsylvania, dedicated a bronze statue of Stewart on his 75th birthday in 1983, and it still stands on the courthouse lawn near his boyhood home.
Q 02What kind of business did Stewart's father run?
A hardware store
A hardware store, founded by his grandfather: his father hoped Jimmy would come home to run it, and put his son's Academy Award on display there.
Q 03Which instrument did James Stewart play as a boy and later on screen in the Western Night Passage?
Accordion
Accordion: Stewart was an amateur accordionist long before he acted, and the director who quit Night Passage later accused him of making the film only to play one.
Q 04What subject did Stewart major in at Princeton?
Architecture
Architecture: with few building jobs to be had in the Depression, he took up a friend's offer to join a summer theatre company on Cape Cod instead.
Q 05Which future star shared rooms with Stewart in New York when both were struggling stage actors in the early 1930s?
Henry Fonda
Henry Fonda, a liberal Democrat, stayed friends for life with the conservative Stewart by a simple rule: the pair did not talk politics.
Q 06Stewart's first film for Frank Capra was which 1938 comedy, that year's Best Picture winner?
You Can't Take It with You
You Can't Take It with You came his way because Capra had noticed him in Navy Blue and Gold, so MGM lent Stewart to Columbia to play the banker's son opposite Jean Arthur.
Q 07In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart's Jefferson Smith is head of which youth organisation?
The Boy Rangers
The Boy Rangers adore their leader Jefferson Smith, and it is the governor's own children who badger their father into handing him the vacant Senate seat.
Q 08Which star played Frenchy, the saloon singer who falls for Stewart's pacifist lawman, in Destry Rides Again?
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich, playing against type as the brawling Frenchy, introduced 'See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have' in the film, and it became one of her hit records.
Q 09In The Shop Around the Corner, Stewart's clerk and a co-worker he can't stand unknowingly become what?
Romantic pen-pals
Romantic pen-pals: the two bickering Budapest shop clerks fall in love by anonymous letter, a plot later reworked with email as You've Got Mail.
Q 10For which film did Stewart win his only competitive Academy Award?
The Philadelphia Story
The Philadelphia Story won him Best Actor as a tabloid reporter covering a society wedding, and within weeks of the ceremony he had swapped Hollywood for an Army uniform.
Q 11Who directed Stewart, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story?
George Cukor
George Cukor was Katharine Hepburn's choice: she held the film rights to the play and sold them to MGM only on terms that let her pick her director and co-stars.
Q 12Why did the Army turn Stewart down at his first physical, before he enlisted in 1941?
He was underweight
He was underweight for his six-foot-three frame, and even at a second physical in 1941 the lanky star only just scraped through to be inducted as a private.
Q 13Which bomber did Stewart fly in combat over Europe as a squadron commander in the Second World War?
B-24 Liberator
Q 21Which director made eight films with Stewart, among them the Western The Man from Laramie?
Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann's Westerns gave Stewart a harder edge, recasting Hollywood's most genial leading man as bitter, obsessive loners driven by revenge.
Q 22In The Stratton Story (1949) Stewart played a baseball pitcher who lost what in a hunting accident?
A leg
A leg: Monty Stratton of the Chicago White Sox lost his right leg after shooting himself by accident in 1938, yet eight years later he was pitching again in the minor leagues on an artificial one.
Q 23Which bandleader did Stewart portray in a 1954 biopic co-starring June Allyson?
Glenn Miller
B-24 Liberator: fearing his fame would keep him in safe training jobs, Stewart pressed for a combat posting and led his squadron's bombers to England in November 1943.
Q 14Stewart retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1968 holding which rank?
Brigadier general
Brigadier general: he had joined the Army in 1941 as a private and finished the war a colonel, then kept training with the reserve between films until he turned sixty.
Q 15In which 1955 film did Stewart, himself a reserve pilot, play a baseball star called back into uniform?
Strategic Air Command
Strategic Air Command put him back in a cockpit on screen, yet Stewart kept a clause in his contracts barring studios from using his real war record to sell his films.
Q 16During the Vietnam War, Stewart flew as an observer aboard which aircraft on a 1966 bombing mission?
B-52 Stratofortress
He rarely spoke of his war service, though he discussed the Schweinfurt raid in The World at War.
Q 17What is the name of Stewart's character in It's a Wonderful Life?
George Bailey
George Bailey was Stewart's first part after coming home from the war, in a film that disappointed at the box office yet became his own favourite of all his pictures.
Q 18What turned It's a Wonderful Life from a box-office disappointment into a Christmas tradition?
A lapsed copyright
A lapsed copyright: once the film fell out of copyright in the 1970s, television stations could air it freely every Christmas, and the endless repeats won it the audience it had missed in 1946.
Q 19In Harvey, Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd has an invisible best friend of what species?
A rabbit
A rabbit: Harvey is a pooka, a shape-shifting spirit of Celtic folklore, and by the end of the film even the sanatorium's chief doctor has begun to see him.
Q 20In 1950 Stewart traded his usual salary for a share of the profits of which Western?
Winchester '73
Winchester '73 turned into a surprise hit, so the gamble paid Stewart far more than his usual fee, and other stars were soon demanding a cut of the profits too.
Glenn Miller vanished in 1944 when his plane was lost over the English Channel, and the film of his life became one of the most popular Stewart ever made.
Q 24Which was the first of Stewart's four films with Alfred Hitchcock?
Rope
Rope cast Stewart as the old teacher of two young men who strangle a friend, hide him in a chest and then serve a dinner party from its lid.
Q 25In Rear Window, L. B. Jefferies is confined to a wheelchair in an apartment in which New York neighbourhood?
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village never saw a camera: the whole courtyard, with its dozens of apartments, was built indoors on a single Paramount stage and filmed from Jefferies's room.
Q 26Which singer co-starred with Stewart in Hitchcock's 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much?
Doris Day
Doris Day sings 'Que Sera, Sera' in the film so that her kidnapped son will hear her, and the song won an Oscar and became her signature tune.
Q 27In Vertigo, Stewart plays a retired detective from which city who suffers a crippling fear of heights?
San Francisco
San Francisco landmarks from Fort Point to Mission Dolores fill the film, and the zoom-while-tracking shot devised to show Scottie's dizziness is still called the Vertigo shot.
Q 28Which film did Vertigo displace atop the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll?
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane had topped every critics' poll since 1962, while Vertigo had not even reached the top ten until 1982, two years after Hitchcock's death.
Q 29Which Hitchcock thriller did Stewart want to star in, only for the lead to go to Cary Grant the year after Vertigo?
North by Northwest
North by Northwest went to Grant because Hitchcock blamed Vertigo's limited success on Stewart looking too old for his young co-star, though Grant was in fact four years older.
Q 30Which jazz great scored Stewart's courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder and also appears in it?
Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington turns up as Pie Eye, leader of a roadhouse band, and Stewart's jazz-loving lawyer sits down beside him at the piano.