If the clue about a dad who played a small-town guy discovering the true meaning of Christmas sent you straight to Bedford Falls, you guessed right. That dad was Jimmy Stewart, the George Bailey of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and the girl on our card was his daughter Kelly. She grew up in a Beverly Hills house where the most famous Christmas movie ever made played on the television every December, and where, as she tells it, nobody treated it like anything special.
Kelly Stewart Harcourt turned 75 on May 7, and the life she built is about as far from Hollywood as a movie star’s child can get. Her father had four children in all, two stepsons and a pair of twin girls, and each of them took a very different road. Kelly’s road eventually led back to her father in a way nobody expected, and this month it has put her in the spotlight he always kept her out of.
How Jimmy Stewart Became A Father Of Four
Stewart was 41 and had been a bachelor through his whole rise to stardom when he married Gloria Hatrick McLean on August 9, 1949, at Brentwood Presbyterian Church. Gloria came with two young sons from her first marriage, Ronald, born in 1944, and Michael, born in 1946. Stewart adopted both boys. Less than two years later, on May 7, 1951, Gloria gave birth to twin daughters, Judy and Kelly.
The girls grew up with a father who left the movie star at the studio gate. “Dad as a father was great, because he never lectured us on how to be good,” Kelly told ABC10 in a 2021 interview. “He taught us by the way he lived.” Watching him work never tempted her to follow him. “The life of an actor didn’t really look like that much fun to me,” she told writer Nick Thomas for his book Raised by the Stars.
That included the movie he loved most, the one with all those behind-the-scenes secrets fans still trade every December. Once It’s a Wonderful Life began airing on television, Kelly told AARP, “we watched it pretty much every Christmas.” As a teenager she was not impressed. “This is OK, it’s a ritual, we do it at Christmases. It’s kind of corny,” she remembered thinking. Her opinion would change completely, but not before the family lived through a loss that no Christmas movie could soften.
The Son Jimmy Stewart Lost In Vietnam
Ronald McLean followed his stepfather into the military. Stewart had flown bombing missions over Europe in World War II and stayed in the Air Force Reserve for decades, eventually retiring as a brigadier general. Ronald joined the Marine Corps and became a first lieutenant, and on June 8, 1969, he was killed in action in Vietnam. He was 24. According to InStyle, Stewart summed up his grief in five words: “He died for his country.”
Michael McLean chose a quieter path and stayed out of the public eye for his whole life. He outlived both of his parents, and Hello! magazine reported that he died in 2022 after a battle with cancer, leaving sons of his own. Gloria died of lung cancer on February 16, 1994, and Stewart died at his Beverly Hills home on July 2, 1997, at 89. That left the twins, and it was one of them who found something in his bedroom that none of them knew existed.
What Judy Stewart Found In Her Father’s Bedside Drawer
Judy has always been the more private twin. She married Steven Merrill in 1979, according to InStyle, and raised two sons, David and John, far from the cameras. She has given almost no interviews. Yet her sister credits her with the discovery that unlocked their father’s story.
After Stewart died, Judy opened a drawer next to his bed and found a handwritten journal he had kept during the war, along with his flight logbook. “My father didn’t speak about his war experience very much,” Kelly told Military Times. “Dad didn’t talk very much about himself, so this was a real look inside dad that we had never had before.” The pages were full of fear, and full of a son still trying to make his own father proud. “He hated it when planes didn’t come back,” she told Military.com, adding that he called it a “dirty, stinking war.”
She still doesn’t know why he kept it within reach. “I always wonder, why did he keep it next to his bed?” she said. “Did he read it? Or did he want us to find it?” Kelly would spend years with that question, and the answer she settled on became the reason she said yes to a project she had every reason to turn down.
From Dian Fossey’s Gorillas To Her Father’s Movie, What Kelly Is Doing Today
Kelly’s own story began on a family safari to East Africa when she was 14, which her official biography says sparked her love of wildlife. After graduating from Stanford with a degree in anthropology in 1973, she went to Rwanda to work at Dian Fossey’s Karisoke Research Center, studying wild mountain gorillas. In 1974 she was the first to spot a newborn gorilla in one of Fossey’s study groups, and PBS’s Nature credits her with naming him Titus. He grew into the famous silverback known as the Gorilla King.
Rwanda also gave her a husband. She met fellow researcher Alexander “Sandy” Harcourt at Karisoke and married him in 1977. She earned her PhD in zoology at Cambridge, and in 1989 the couple joined the anthropology department at the University of California, Davis. In 2007 they published Gorilla Society together through the University of Chicago Press. Today both are retired, still involved in gorilla conservation, and Kelly lives in Inverness, California, according to AARP.
Her newest title is one she never planned on. Kelly is an executive producer of Jimmy, the biopic starring KJ Apa that opened in theaters on November 6 and follows her father from Hollywood into the cockpit of a bomber. The journal Judy found shaped the script, and the family even lent his real 1941 Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story as a prop. “At airport security, they saw that iconic shape in the X-ray and asked, ‘What did you win it for?'” she told LAmag. Of Apa, she said, “He captures Dad without doing a Jimmy Stewart impression.”
The twins saw the finished film side by side. “Judy and I watched it together at her house, and there were major waterworks,” Kelly told AARP. About 10 years ago she finally gave her father’s Christmas movie a second chance as an adult, and the girl who found it corny was “totally blown away by it.” Her favorite moment is George Bailey falling apart at Martini’s bar. “That scene in the bar, to me, is the best end-of-your-rope scene to come out of Hollywood,” she said. As for the man who played him, the advice she keeps coming back to is the one he gave her and Judy before they left for college: “Always remember, no matter what happens, be nice to people.”
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