Tom Hanks Still Recalls ‘Every Moment’ of Visiting Jimmy Stewart’s ‘Lovely’ Home 35 Years Later (Exclusive)

Tom Hanks can recall “every moment” of seeing the house of a Hollywood legend. 

Hanks visited Jimmy Stewart’s home in 1989 when they were photographed together for a special issue of Life magazine. It was “a lovely house,” as Hanks remembers it on the red carpet of the world premiere of his new movie Here at AFI Fest in Los Angeles on Friday, Oct. 25. 

“He had absolutely no memorabilia from his career,” reports Hanks. “None. Zero. He had nothing. No sign of a movie that he had made.”

The two-time Oscar winner conceded that there were a handful of reminders of Stewart’s legendary screen career, but not nearly as many as there could have been. “He had one tiny little figurine of Harvey the rabbit on a bookshelf,” he says. Stewart, who died in 1997 at age 89, starred in the 1950 film Harvey, about a man and his invisible rabbit friend.

“That was it,” recalls Hanks, “in a huge house.” 

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That, and a watercolor painting of Pie, the horse Stewart rode in many of his movies. Hank Fonda, a costar from 1970’s The Cheyenne Social Club, gifted Stewart a rendering of the beloved animal — who, Hanks recalls, Stewart said died two weeks later. 

“Would you forget a story like that?” quips Hanks. 

Stewart, he adds, “used to live right across the street from Lucille Ball… What are those parties like?”

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The 1989 Life magazine issue featured pairs of actors hailing from different generations, including William Hurt and Olivia de Havilland, Meryl Streep and Bette Davis and Michael Keaton and Mickey Rooney, in addition to Hanks and Stewart.

Hanks next stars in Here (in theaters Nov. 1 ), which reunites him with Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis and costar Robin Wright. Co-written by Eric Roth and Zemeckis and costarring Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly, the film takes place in one room over several years. Among his other upcoming projects is Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, in which he'll star alongside Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch.