#6: The Academy Award Win (1941)
Stewart won the Best Actor Oscar for The Philadelphia Story (1940), playing opposite Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in one of the great sophisticated comedies. Photographs of him with the award capture a star at a peak he would soon walk away from. His Oscar is often described as partly making up for not winning for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but that hardly matters now. The statue went to a man whose screen persona had become impossible to ignore.
