Two famous movie stars died this past week: Robert Mitchum, then four days later, Jimmy Stewart. Mitchum was a big name in the movies, a superstar, and extraordinarily productive. He must have made over 200 movies. In one year, I think it was 1944, he made eighteen movies.

But Jimmy Stewart was a different kind of actor. Jimmy Stewart was in the pantheon that is reserved for those we lift up to be icons, mythical figures who represent what we believe in, and who act out on the screen the way we would like to be.

I heard Janet Maislan interviewed on the NewsHour by Jim Lehrer this last week, on the day that Jimmy Stewart died. Lehrer asked Maislan, who is a movie critic for The New York Times, "What was Jimmy Stewart really like? What was the real person behind the myth really like?" She …