Gloria Stuart, a glamorous blond actress during Hollywood’s golden age who was largely forgotten until she made a memorable comeback in her 80s in the 1997 epic “Titanic,” died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 100.
Her daughter, Sylvia Vaughn Thompson, confirmed the death.
Ms. Stuart had long since moved on from Hollywood when James Cameron, the director of “Titanic,” rediscovered her for the role of Rose Calvert, a 101-year-old survivor of the ship’s sinking. She was 86 at the time.
Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actress. It was her only Oscar nomination, and she was the oldest person ever to receive one for acting. (She lost to Kim Basinger.)
Rose’s wistful recollections of a love affair aboard the ship as it headed for disaster on its maiden voyage form the frame of “Titanic.” Kate Winslet, who was nominated for best actress, played the character as a young, well-to-do, romantically restless passenger in first class who falls in love with a poor would-be artist in steerage, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie won 11 Oscars and was the top-grossing film of all time until it was overtaken in 2009 by “Avatar,” also directed by Mr. Cameron.
Audiences in 1997 had little if any memory of Ms. Stuart’s early screen career, but it had been substantial: a total of 46 films from 1932 to 1946. She abandoned movies, she said, after growing tired of being typecast as “girl reporter, girl detective, girl overboard.”
“So one day, I burned everything: my scripts, my stills, everything,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1997. “I made a wonderful fire in the incinerator, and it was very liberating.”
In the best of her early movies, Ms. Stuart, a petite and elegant presence, was forced to seek shelter with Boris Karloff in James Whale’s classic horror film “The Old Dark House” (1932) and was horrified when Claude Rains, her mad-scientist fiancé, tampered with nature in “The Invisible Man” (1933), also directed by Whale.
She was James Cagney’s girlfriend in “Here Comes the Navy” (1934), Warner Baxter’s faithful wife in John Ford’s “Prisoner of Shark Island” (1936), Shirley Temple’s cousin in “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (1938) and the spoiled rich girl who falls in love with penniless Dick Powell in “Gold Diggers of 1935.”
“Few actresses were so ornamental,” John Springer and Jack Hamilton wrote in “They Had Faces Then,” a book about the actresses of the 1930s. “But ‘undemanding’ is the word for most of the roles she played.”
After a small role in the limp 1946 comedy “She Wrote the Book,” Ms. Stuart had had enough and left the film world, not to be seen again until she appeared in a television movie almost 30 years later.
Although Screen Play magazine had called Ms. Stuart one of the 10 most beautiful women in Hollywood, she was more than a pretty face. She was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, an early antifascist organization.
After she left Hollywood, Ms. Stuart taught herself to paint. In 1961 she had her first one-woman show, at Hammer Galleries in New York.
In 1983 the master printer Ward Ritchie taught her to print, and she started a fresh career as a respected designer of hand-printed artists’ books and broadsides. She produced illustrated books and broadsides under her own imprint, Imprenta Glorias, including “Haiku,” “Beware the Ides of March” and “The Watts Towers.”
Ms. Stuart and Mr. Ritchie also began an autumn romance that lasted until Mr. Ritchie’s death in 1996 at the age of 91. Her print work is in the collections of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Gloria Frances Stewart was born in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 4, 1910, two years before the Titanic sank. When she started in movies, Ms. Stuart wrote in her autobiography, “I Just Kept Hoping” (Little Brown, 1999), a collaboration with her daughter, she shortened “Stewart” to “Stuart” “because I thought — and still do — its six letters balanced perfectly on a theater’s marquee with the six letters in ‘Gloria.’ ”
She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she met her first husband, the sculptor Gordon Newell. Settling in Carmel, Calif., in 1930, she and Mr. Newell joined a bohemian community that included the photographer Edward Weston and the journalist Lincoln Steffens. Ms. Stuart acted at the Golden Bough Theater and wrote for a weekly newspaper.
In 1932 Mr. Ritchie, who was Mr. Newell’s best friend, drove her to Pasadena, where she had been offered a role at the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse. “The morning after I opened in Chekhov’s ‘The Sea Gull,’ ” Ms. Stuart remembered, “I signed a seven-year contract with Universal.”
Soon came movies like “The Girl in 419” (1933), in which she played a mysterious woman who witnesses a murder. Her social circle included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and other New York intellectuals who had settled at the Garden of Allah hotel while writing and acting in movies. An excellent cook whose oxtail stew with dumplings was praised by M. F. K. Fisher in her book “The Gastronomical Me,” Ms. Stuart liked to cook Sunday dinners for them.
Ms. Stuart and Mr. Newell divorced in 1934; later that year she married Arthur Sheekman, a screenwriter who worked on Marx Brothers movies.
After Ms. Stuart gave up on Hollywood, the Sheekmans sailed around the world and settled in New York. She had a daughter with Mr. Sheekman and later moved to Italy with them and started to paint. Mr. Sheekman died in 1978.
Besides her daughter, Ms. Thompson, Ms. Stuart is survived by four grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
Ms. Stuart made brief returns to film and television acting in the 1970s and had a cameo role in the 1982 film “My Favorite Year,” in which she danced with Peter O’Toole, who starred as a worn-at-the-edges film idol.
But it was “Titanic,” 15 years later, that made Ms. Stuart a celebrity again. She was interviewed on television, invited to Russia for the opening of the movie there and chosen by People magazine as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. Her newfound fame resulted in more film and television work into her 90s.
If she had been more famous as an actress, Ms. Stuart might never have won the role of Rose Calvert; Mr. Cameron wanted a lesser-known actress for the part, one who, as Ms. Stuart said in a 1997 interview, was “still viable, not alcoholic, rheumatic or falling down.”
Ms. Stuart was so viable that it took an hour and a half each day to transform her youthful 86-year-old features into the face of a 101-year-old woman.
When the script of “Titanic” was sent to her, Ms. Stuart told The Chicago Tribune, she thought, “If I had been given plum roles like this back in the old days, I would have stayed in Hollywood.”
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