Death
Stewart had undergone surgery for skin cancer in 1983. In April 1993 he underwent heart surgery and had a pacemaker installed. On January 31, 1997, Stewart tripped over a plant in his bedroom and was rushed to a hospital for stitches to close a bloody gash in his forehead. There it was discovered that he had skin cancer which appeared to be untreatable. He was sent home.
On July 2, 1997, an embolism lodged in his lungs. The clot caused a heart attack that killed him instantly. He was 89 years old. His death came one day after the death of his one-time co-star Robert Mitchum (The Big Sleep). James Stewart is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, alongside his wife, Gloria, who had died from lung cancer on February 16, 1994. President Bill Clinton commented on Stewart's death, saying: "America lost a national treasure today. Jimmy Stewart was a great actor, a gentleman and a patriot."
Read more about this topic: James Stewart
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“When Gabriel’s trumpet ends all life’s delay,
Will crash the beams of firmamental woe:
Not nature will sustain the even crime
Of death, though death sustains all nature, so.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include “Capital Lawes” providing a death penalty for any child over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)