Gloria Stuart, the 1930s actress best known for her comeback as “Old Rose” in TITANIC, has passed away at 100. No word yet on what she died of but bar fight injury and meth overdose outside The Viper Room seem to have been ruled out.
She seemed a very cool old broad.
I didn’t care much for The Titanic, but I did like her part.
She had a great bit sequence dancing with Peter O’Toole in My Favorite Year. Charming…
Damn.
0 points for my death pool.
More than her acting I liked the ‘concept’ of her, if that makes sense.
She told the story of how she got the role in TITANIC on one of her many TV appearances at the time. The producers originally considered Katharine Hepburn but she was retired and not the least bit interested in doing any role plus had health problems, then basically went down a list of 20s and 30s starlets trying to find some who were still alive/healthy enough to perform/willing to perform/looked the part. It was a short list.
When they contacted her she was stunned- other than some bit roles and extra work she hadn’t acted in decades and was offered the biggest role of her life out of the blue. She had owned and operated a print shop since the 1950s and told Cameron’s reps “Not only do I no longer have an agent, my last agent is dead!” She also admitted that she wasn’t really that anxious to take the role, but her daughter and son-in-law were both laid off and living with her and she wanted to get them a house. (No idea how much she earned from the movie but should have been enough for that.)
She wasn’t on par with “Sarah Bernhardt in her prime” as far as acting talent but she at least did a good job of it, and the scene where she tumps the necklace overboard had a delightful childlike quality. And it’s a cool story, on par with the old man from a chain gang who unexpected got tens of thousands of dollars in royalties from Oh Brother Where Art Thou in a “great latter day fame” moment.
Her heart will no longer go on. R.I.P.
Just hearing this on the evening news, and they noted that her mother was related to Jesse James (the original one). Which is kind of a weird way of putting it, since that would make her related to him, too.
I always thought it was amusing that Old Rose was older than Gloria, so they had to age her for the role. Imagine, at 87, being too young for a part. I love Titanic and thought she was the weakest link, but I still liked her, and her story. She had a good, long, interesting life.
It’s nice that she died in her sleep, just like Old Rose.
What’s that story? I adore the movie, it’s my favorite Coen Brothers film, but I haven’t heard it.
What a tragedy. Why do the best actresses always die so young?
One of the songs on the soundtrack was Po Lazarus, a chain gang song recorded by a traveling folk song collector at a Mississippi prison camp in 1959. The “lead singer” (though none would have thought of him as such then) was James Carter, a 33 year old inmate there. He never made a penny off the initial release of the recording and it was only a happen so that T Bone Burnett stumbled across the recording in a music archives and used it, and nobody expected the soundtrack to OBWAT to go multi-multi-platinum, BUT… after several months of tracking Burnett’s people located Carter, who was 76, had long since “gone straight”, and was living in Chicago and presented him with a check for $20,000, the first of several royalty payments as lead singer.
Full story here.
I’ve no idea how much he eventually earned, but even if that was the big one then it was a nice little windfall for an old man who barely remembered making a recording 43 years before. He died the next year, but at least he had a chance to enjoy some of it and it gave him a nice little bit of change to leave his family.
My favorite part of the story is what he said when told that “his” CD was outselling several major artists who released CDs at the same time.
Oh, wow. RIP, Gloria.
If TCM shows “The Old Dark House”, a REAL oldie, barely a talkie, around Halloween or something, it is startlingly creepy, and stars Boris Karloff and of course Gloria. You should take a look just to see what she looked like in her youth. She was right up there in her slinky satin gown with Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow.
Go on with yer hunnert year-old self, Gloria!
Here’s a great photo of her in the Hollywood gorgeous years.
About a decade ago, my family & I attended a Gloria Stuart film festival at which she spoke. It was at the Egyptian Theatre in L.A. and they showed The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Golddiggers of 1935. (They also did Titanic the next day but we didn’t get to that.) She was delightful- rambled on telling various stories that either didn’t go anywhere or repeated on themselves- it was charming & fascinating. What stood out was the story of how she & the U.S. actors on The Old Dark House decided to form SAG after seeing the perks had by the British actors due to the British actors union. She somehow told that story three times in her presentation. God bless her & grant her rest.
This film is also available on DVD. IIRC, Gloria Stuart did commentary on it and spoke of how director James Whale sent her running around the old-dark-house sets in her white dress–’'like a bright flame in the darkness."
What a shame, I was hoping she’d reach 101, the “in-story” age of old Rose.
But at least she outlasted all actual survivors of Titanic.
Speaking of James Whale, in her book Gloria recounted being used as an unwitting beard for Whale’s longtime live-in lover David Lewis. She honestly had no idea that Whale and Lewis were a couple- this being the 1930s and she being a relatively naive 20-something starlet- and was surprised at how shy Lewis was with her in private and how affectionate when the cameras were around. Whale was much more open about his orientation, eventually completely so, which led in part to his breakup with the much more image conscious Lewis. (Lewis’s most famous beard would be Elizabeth Taylor who he “dated” when he was producing Raintree County and she was between Michael Wilding and Michael Todd.)
She was actually older than several of the last few Titanic survivors (all of whom were babies or toddlers and had no real memories of the event). Gloria was not quite 2 when the ship sank.
