Which actor played the photographer L. B. Jeffries in Rear Window?

James Stewart played photographer L. B. Jeffries in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Released in 1954, Rear Window casts Stewart as Jeff, a professional photojournalist confined to a wheelchair after breaking his leg on assignment. During a heat wave, he spends his recovery watching the residents around an apartment courtyard. His casual observations become a suspected murder investigation when he notices suspicious behavior from traveling salesman Lars Thorwald.

The film turns looking into its central dramatic device. Jeff cannot move freely, so the audience discovers the courtyard and its residents through his telephoto lens and apartment window. Grace Kelly plays Lisa Fremont, Jeff’s fashionable girlfriend, while Thelma Ritter plays Stella, his visiting nurse. Raymond Burr portrays Thorwald, the neighbor Jeff suspects.

A common mix-up is identifying Jeff as a detective, but he is a photographer whose visual training makes him unusually attentive to distant details. The character is also sometimes listed with slightly different punctuation or capitalization as L. B. “Jeff” Jefferies. Hitchcock based the film on Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story “It Had to Be Murder,” expanding its confined viewpoint into a study of voyeurism, suspicion, and cinema itself.