I am certainly not going to diagnose Jimmy Stewart. But after reading this:
While post-traumatic stress disorder was not diagnosed as such at the time, Stewart’s biographer Robert Matzen has suggested he was suffering from PTSD during filming, which strongly influenced his portrayal of George Bailey’s struggles.
At one point in the movie, a desperate Bailey drinks despondently in a bar, crying, “I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope.” Afterward, Stewart said the breakdown was unscripted. “As I said those words, I felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn,” he remembered in 1977. “I broke down sobbing. That was not planned at all.”
I get really angry.
The man was an actor who felt emotions and interpreted them. That is what actors do. One does not have to have PTSD to understand and feel the pain and hopelessness of the human condition. That is part of being human. To make it a pathology is perverting what it is like to have human empathy.
Chickensoup,
Yes, Jimmy Stewart was an actor, but based upon several biographies of him that I’ve read, he was unsure if he could return to being an actor after the war. If you look at the pictures he was in pre-1941, most were of the “light hearted” variety. His post war pictures show a man who was changed, physically and mentally, from the pre-war man. His post-war movies were consistently of a more serious vein. And look at his face, one can see how he aged during the war years and his combat tour flying B-24s with the Eighth Air Force.
I recommend two biographies of him and his service in the USAAF: “Jimmy Stewart - Bomber Pilot” by Starr Smith, and “Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe” by Robert Matzen.