Henry Fonda was born in Nebraska on May 16, 1905.

I think I first became aware of him, and the integrity of his characters, with the 1964 film Fail-Safe, where he played the president (shortly after Kennedy’s assassination; I wanted Fonda to be my president now.) who tries to find some kind of moral order after the United States accidentally launches a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

(He never would’ve made the film, Fonda admitted, had he known Dr. Strangelove was coming out the same year.)

Both films were made shortly after aluminum strips, called chaff, fell on the Branch School playground, Designed to foil Soviet radar, they’d been dropped from American bombers high above us.

So Fonda impressed me. Later, I discovered him in John Ford films like My Darling Clementine.”Ford, and later Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West, seemed to be taken by Fonda’s impossibly long legs. In this excerpt, Fonda’s Wyatt Earp and Clementine celebrate a church-raising in Tombstone.

I did not realize until just a few years ago that he had a gift for physical comedy, with the radiant Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, in this scene, which I think is enormously sexy. Stanwyck is a card sharp, the erudite and fumbly Fonda is her pigeon and she, of course, falls in love with him.

Fonda was neurotic, complicated, closed, a distant father and husband and was only completely himself on the stage where, in his twenties, in a Brooklyn brownstone–in 1933, when the Depression was at its nadir–his roommate was another aspiring actor, James Stewart.

I would need about twenty more pages to tell you how much I love James Stewart, who was a far less complicated and far more straightforward man.

The two roommates, whose daily meal in their brownstone days might consist of a bag of roasted peanuts, remained friends until the ends of their lives.

Fonda, of course, was a passionate liberal. Stewart, the lifelong Air Force officer, was a devout conservative.

It was Fonda who helped to restore Stewart, deeply depressed from his combat experience as a bomber pilot during World War II, who would go on to make It’s A Wonderful Life.

It was Stewart who declined the role offered him for a film project, On Golden Pond, for which his friend Hank would win the Academy Award.

I’m pretty sure we Americans could learn something from a friendship like theirs.