Glory Stuart

And yet, Gloria Stuart’s film career resembles that of a missing Titanic passenger, who reappears more than 30 years after the ship collided with the fatal iceberg, in top form. Because indeed, after living a prolific career in the 1930s and 1940s, Gloria Stuart was absent from the screens for more than 30 years, only to return to television in the 1970s. Although it can be said that the one who really rescued her for the movies was James Cameron in  Titanic. It was 1997 and the actress was 86. Which meant that her role as elderly Rose, a classy passenger on the Titanic who remembers her romance with Jack, earned her an Oscar nomination – the oldest person to date to have been nominated for the award. – and know a revival on celluloid, and in popular imagery. She would always be remembered for the role of a centennial woman who remembers her great love story. And interestingly, she has died with the age of her character.

Gloria Frances Stewart, later known as Gloria Stuart, was born on Independence Day, that is, July 4, 1910, a couple of years before the Titanic sank. She would record the actress’ memories of her life in a book published in 1999, “I Just Kept Hoping,” in collaboration with her only daughter. She received a college education at Berkeley, where she met her first husband, the sculptor Gordon Newell. They were years of life as an artist, in which Stuart wrote for a magazine, and she did her first roles as an actress at the Golden Bough Theater. In 1932 she played a role in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the Pasadena Playhouse, her springboard to the movies, as she soon after signed a seven-year contract with Universal.

Universal was well known at the time as the horror movie studio, and Stuart worked under James Whale on two classics,  The Mansion in the Shadows  – with Boris Karloff – and  The Invisible Man  – here with Claude Rains – . The truth is that until 1946, when he retired from the cinema, he made more than 40 films. They wouldn’t be memorable compositions, but Stuart’s blond beauty was striking, his reasonable efficiency as a secondary. Although he had some opportunity to acquire a leading role in series B, such as in  Unknown identity (1933). Other noteworthy works from this period are  Here Comes the Navy  (1934) –withJames Cagney –,  Vampiress of 1935  – with Dick Powell –,  Prisoner of Hate  (1936) – directed by John Ford – and  The Three Musketeers (1939).

Stuart divorced in 1934, and married Arthur Sheekman , a screenwriter for Marx Brothers films. She had her daughter with him – who has given him four grandchildren – and they remained together until Sheekman’s death in 1978. The cultured actress was always attentive to her intellectual activities. For example, she frequented Dorothy Parker and her New York circle, she collaborated with the anti-Nazi league in Hollywood, and she is even one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild. In her non-interpretive period she cultivated as a painter, and she exhibited at the Hammer Gallery in New York. Some of her work can be seen at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and at the Albert Museum in London. She also entered the world of printing and book illustration.